Donald Brownlee
Donald Brownlee
Donald Eugene Brownleeis a professor of astronomy at the University of Washingtonand the principal investigator for NASA's Stardust mission. His primary research interests include astrobiology, comets, and cosmic dust. He was born in Las Vegas, Nevada...
samples universe
When you have the samples in hand, it's a whole different universe.
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It's thrilling. We have samples of a comet from the edge of the solar system.
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Remarkably enough, we have found fire and ice. We've found samples from the coldest part of the solar system that have mineral grains formed under extremely high temperatures.
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I fully expect that textbooks in the future will have a lot of information about the formation of the solar system from these samples that landed this morning in Utah.
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In the coldest part of the solar system, we've found samples that have formed at extremely high temperatures. When these minerals formed, they were either red-hot or white-hot grains.
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Inside this thing is our treasure, our sample of the edge of the solar system that truly contains star dust.
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We?re using this comet as a library that picked up records and stored them far from the sun at very low temperatures for 4.5 billion years.
ended might standing
They always ended up with a rigid, crusty material. If you were standing on it you might go right through it.
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Scientifically, that's great, because there's been lots of discussion of whether comets contain minerals or glass.
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At this point in time, we're absolutely thrilled. It's totally remarkable to have a fully successful mission. Of all the things that could go wrong either in space or even scientifically, none of the bad things happened and everything really exceeded our wildest expectations.
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It exceeds all expectations. It's a huge success. We can see lots of impacts. There are big ones, there are small ones.
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It exceeds all expectations. It's a huge success.
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It exceeded all of our grandest expectations. We should have more than 1 million particles larger than 1 micron in diameter.
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We can tell the difference, absolutely, for something that formed in our own solar system, and something that formed around another star.