Don Brownlee Comet Quotations

The primary purpose of the Stardust mission was to collect comet dust, the most basic material of the solar system, and bring it back to Earth for study.

Our mission is called Stardust, in part because we believe some of the particles in the comet will, in fact, be older than the sun.

We were stunned when we got to the comet and saw incredible features - steep cliffs, overhanging cliffs, spires and many features which, oddly enough, we had never been seen on other Solar System bodies.

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.

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

The real exciting thing will be opening the canister and seeing what the comet delivered to us.

We did this mission to collect the most primitive materials we could in the solar system. We went to a comet that formed at the edge of the solar system, far from the sun under very cold conditions. We're confident that it was made out of the initial building blocks of our solar system.

Each year we have 30 to 40,000 tons of primitive material from comets and asteroids that lands on Earth, and this is about one particle per square meter per day. So during the course of our seven-year mission, there was more comet dust collected in your backyard than what we're bringing home.

You're seeing the very first, absolutely identified comet particle that has ever been seen.

This comet formed at very edge of the solar system ... out by pluto ... and spent all its lifetime out there until recently it came into the inner part of the solar system, where we could sample it.

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.

The fundamental reason for this mission is that we are collecting what we believe are the best preserved samples of the formation of our solar system and they are preserved because they formed these comet bodies beyond the major planets out beyond Neptune.

These are literally the building blocks of our planetary system. All of the atoms in our bodies - the carbon atoms, the oxygen, the nitrogen, potassium, calcium and so forth - all of those atoms were in stardust grains like those coming out of the comet now before the solar system formed.

About 10 per cent of this comet is made of organic materials. We don't know exactly what they all are but it is very exciting.