Quentin Williams Quotations

Some asteroids look like small planets, not very disturbed, and at the other end of the spectrum are ones that look like iron-rich dog bones in space.

As two massive objects pass near each other, gravitational forces induce dramatic physical changes -- decompressing, melting, stripping material away and even annihilating the smaller object.

We're looking at what happens when worlds collide.

It's like uncorking the world's most carbonated beverage. What happens when a planet gets decompressed by 50 percent is something we don't understand very well at this stage, but it can shift the chemistry and physics all over the place, producing a complexity of materials that could very well account for the heterogeneity we see in meteorites.