61 Quotes by Don Brownlee

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're just starting to work on this ... it will take years to analyze.

We've undergone a very heavy level of scrutiny by review boards because of Genesis and because of the Columbia accident. . . . It was a cultural shift in NASA, that you're now required to understand all the risks.

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

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.

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.

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

Much of the science of this mission hasn't been done yet.

One major concern was having it break open.