Don Brownlee Collected Quotations

We found mineral grains that are considered very high-temperature minerals -- they normally form under extremely high temperature conditions. And yet they were collected in a comet, the Siberia of the solar system.

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

We found the hottest samples in the coldest place. These are mineral grains that normally form under high temperature conditions. They were either red hot or white hot grains. Yet they were collected in the Siberia of the solar system.

Every grain that we collected has a story to tell.

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.

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.