(The research) will involve looking at particles that were kept in the far reaches of our universe in a deep freeze since the beginning of our solar system. |
I owe my career to my education from Purdue and all that I have achieved. |
In order to get to the comet we had to go three times around the sun. |
It can't take any more samples. |
It is a competitive world and NASA has a lot of thinks on its plate. It will be interesting to see if it [Stardust spacecraft] does have a life. |
It was a long 10 years and when it was over it was surprising it was over. |
It was like a hole just opened up in the middle of the sky. |
It?s only 30 inches long, but it?s a pretty mighty craft. Even with a hard landing, we believe we will recover most ? if not all ? of our science. |
Stardust has performed flawlessly these last seven years ... and deserves a rest for a while. |
Ten years of planning and seven years of flight operations were realized early this morning when we successfully picked up our return capsule off of the desert floor in Utah. |
That's a culmination of over ten years worth of work. To see (the capsule) in one piece on the floor of the desert is just very moving. |
The science that's going to come out of this, that's going to tell us about the early formation of our solar system, the role that comets have played in the formation of Earth and ourselves, that will unfold over the next few years. The science that this project is returning will be unprecedented. |
The Stardust project has delivered to the international science community material that has been unaltered since the formation of our solar system. |
There's at least one more we could reach for another flyby. |
There's been this controversy over whether comets are dirty snowballs or icy dirtballs. |