Don Brownlee Quotes (20 Quotes)

We were jumping up and down we were totally overwhelmed by the ability to see this so quickly and so straightforwardly. We were the first people in the history of the planet to see comet dust in hand.

This is very exciting. It's a mystery story.

It's a very exciting mystery story. So stay tuned.

We're confident that the things coming out of Comet Wild 2 are the same as those that went in. We believe that we collected the most pristine samples of a comet, those that have never been warmed.

We traveled almost 3 billion miles in space. We visited a comet, grabbed a piece of it, and it landed here this morning. It's an incredible thrill.

We're just starting to work on this ... it will take years to analyze.

Five minutes before it was supposed to come in, we ran outside. I saw this red thing that, at first, I thought was Mars. Then I noticed it was moving, from our angle it appeared to be climbing. Pretty soon, it had this glowing, reddish tail that lasted maybe half a minute. ... We were all yelling and jumping up and down.

Our history is written at the submicron level, in these interstellar grains.

We believe materials coming out of comets now is the same material that went into comets 4.5 billion years ago.

This is a history project. We are going to the edge of the solar system, collecting the original building blocks of the planets and bringing them back to our labs.

We are collecting the actual building blocks the solar system was formed from 4.5 billion years ago. We believe that the particles have a lot of information stored in them.

We've undergone a very heavy level of scrutiny by review boards because of Genesis and because of the Columbia accident. . . . It was a cultural shift in NASA, that you're now required to understand all the risks.

This is what we looked like 4.5 billion years ago. Comets haven't changed since then.

We'll be able to say some things almost instantly. One of the big questions is do comets contain minerals that contain water, called hydrated silicates and under an electron microscope you can identify those practically instantly.

We have a crew onboard of over a million people -- their names are etched in a little silicon chip. As an astrobiology-type person, I'm intrigued by the thought that those names and that spacecraft will far outlive the Earth. When the Sun becomes a red giant and scorches the Earth, that spacecraft and those names will still be floating around the galaxy somewhere.

We have successfully collected samples from the comet and we're bringing them home for analysis in laboratories all over the world.

This is a really exciting mystery story, so stay tuned.

In recent decades, spacecraft have passed fairly close to comets and provided us with excellent data. Stardust, however, marks the first time that we have ever collected samples from a comet and brought them back to Earth for study.

One major concern was having it break open.

We visited a comet, grabbed a piece of it, and landed here this morning. It was a real thrill.