That's why we were jumping up and down. We were totally overwhelmed by the ability to actually see this. |
The community is real jazzed about it. People all over the world, using all kinds of fantastic instruments and new techniques, are ready. We've got the best people signed up to do the analyses, |
The interesting thing is we are finding these high-temperature minerals in materials from the coldest place in the solar system. |
The most interesting thing about comets is they are libraries with the stored records of our formation. |
The prediction was that we would get a dozen particles larger than human hair size and one particle a little bit larger than a millimeter. |
There's almost no gravity at the surface. If you were standing on [the surface], you could jump into orbit. |
They always ended up with a rigid, crusty material. If you were standing on it you might go right through it. |
This exceeded all of our grandest expectations. |
This was our first view of the comet dust. We are the first people in the history of the planet to see comet dust. |
Virtually all of the atoms in our bodies and in the Earth were in interstellar grains - stardust grains - before the solar system formed. We're using this comet as a library that picked up records of the formation of our solar system, and has been storing them far from the sun at very low temperatures for four and a half billion years. |
We can see lots of impacts. There are big ones, there are small ones. The big ones you can see from 10 feet away. |
We can tell the difference, absolutely, for something that formed in our own solar system, and something that formed around another star. |
We fully expect some of the comet particles to be older than the sun. |
We have always stressed in this mission that we are stardust. Our planet and even our selves have a direct relationship to the particles we brought back. |
We opened the capsule yesterday and it's just full of comet dust. |