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...
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Virtually all of the atoms in our bodies and in the Earth were in interstellar grains - stardust grains - before the solar system formed. We're using this comet as a library that picked up records of the formation of our solar system, and has been storing them far from the sun at very low temperatures for four and a half billion years.
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Its cargo was an ancient, cosmic treasure from the very edge of the solar system ? a treasure that formed when the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.
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We're approaching the end of a fantastic voyage. This is the farthest anything from Earth has traveled and come back. Soon we'll be able to examine the building blocks that formed the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.
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Last Sunday, after seven years in space traveling nearly three billion miles, Stardust landed in the Great Salt Lake Desert with a treasure from when the solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago. We should have more than one million particles larger than one micron in diameter.
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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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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.
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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.