Greg Brennecka

I guess what surprised me the most is how similar it was to the Sun.

And we're able to determine the composition of the Sun with spectral measurements.

They have fairly large uncertainties, but we can easily tell the difference between certain different types of meteorites and the Sun.

And what we noticed very early on is that this is indistinguishable from what we see in the Sun.

And that tells us that this hasn't really changed much from an ingredient standpoint over the four and a half billion years.

So it really is the makeup of the sun, which is 99.9% of the solar system's mass.

We have a sample of it now.

You have a lot of amino acids.

You have all five of the nucleotide bases of DNA and RNA.

You have the sugar backbones.

These are all contained in meteorites, and we found these in the Bennu samples.

Our colleagues have found essentially all the components of DNA and RNA in the Bennu sample.

And that's just super exciting.

If you talk about origins, about where the ingredients for life may have come from or developed, that's pretty exciting to be able to find those in space rocks.

You look at the Apollo samples that were brought back in the 1960s and 70s, and we're still uncovering secrets from those samples.

We're still learning a ton about the moon from the Apollo samples.

And when you archive samples like this, it allows people in the future to look at them with better instrumentation.

I mean, we will have better instrumentation in a decade, in two decades, in five decades.

There's no question.

We have improved our instrumentation.