Don Brownlee Planet Quotations

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.

These are literally the building blocks of our planetary system. Personally, I feel a strong attachment to this thing and we should all feel a strong attachment to it because the fact is all the atoms in our bodies -- the carbon atoms and the oxygen, nitrogen, potassium and calcium and so forth -- all those atoms were in stardust rings ... before the solar system formed.

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.

These are literally the building blocks of our planetary system.

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.

There are two major possibilities. One that they formed in the innermost, hotter-most regions of our solar system when the sun and planets were forming, and they were thrown out -- all the way out to the Pluto region of the solar system. The other possibility is they were formed around other stars, in hot regions around other stars.

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.

Life is fairly easy to create, but I think planets like Earth are going to be rare.