Michael Zolensky Quotations

It seems that comets are...a mixture of materials formed at all temperatures, at places very near the early sun and at places very remote from it.

It raises a question of why we still see zoning in the asteroid belt. It is a big mystery now. It's kind of really exciting.

We were really worried about that and got more and more worried as time went by. So when we opened the tray just two days ago in the lab, we were pleased to find that everything went exactly right -- just fabulous. We couldn't have done a better job catching these particles.

Much of the earth's water and organics perhaps came from comets. This can give us a history of organics in the solar system.

We thought maybe the collectors wouldn't open properly, or maybe they would be covered with gunk from the spacecraft.

That's a big surprise. People thought comets would just be cold stuff that formed out ... where things are very cold. It was kind of a shock to not just find one but several of these, which implies they are pretty common in the comet.

By this week, more than 200 samples will be circulating. Everyone who wants one, and who is qualified to do the analysis, will have one.

They are very small rocks, but they are rocks nonetheless. And what do these minerals tell us about how these grains form? We think that much of the Earth's water and organics ... perhaps came from comets. So what will these samples tell us about basically where our atoms and molecules came from and then how they were delivered to Earth and in what amount?

But we opened the tray, and everything went exactly right. It's fabulous.

I was 8 years old. We studied wastewater disposal and planets.