61 Quotes by Don Brownlee

We are collecting the actual building blocks the solar system was formed from 4.5 billion years ago. We believe that the particles have a lot of information stored in them.

We saw incredible features -- steep cliffs, overhanging cliffs, spires and many other things we had never seen on other solar system bodies.

We believe materials coming out of comets now is the same material that went into comets 4.5 billion years ago.

We have a crew onboard of over a million people -- their names are etched in a little silicon chip. As an astrobiology-type person, I'm intrigued by the thought that those names and that spacecraft will far outlive the Earth. When the Sun becomes a red giant and scorches the Earth, that spacecraft and those names will still be floating around the galaxy somewhere.

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.

We weren't quite sure how bright it was going to be and some people didn't think we would see anything.

We are approaching the end of a quite fantastic voyage.

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.