Harold Connolly Jr.

And going back to your analogy of the dog pee, many of these, in fact, they get contaminated, the meteorites, as they fall to Earth very, very quickly.

So within a day or two, you've already...

and you're interacting with the atmosphere, little microbes start to eat them.

I mean, imagine you're sitting around for four and a half billion years, as Neil said, and you've got nothing to do, nobody to bother you, really, except occasional collision and the sun hit you.

So the other idea was to bring back a sample of pristine material, keep it in a nitrogen environment and analyze it.

And that turns out to be, as we'll see, absolutely critical to what we have been finding in both asteroid Rugu sample and, of course, asteroid Bennu

So let me let me start some trouble.

Well, that's a great question.

And capturing the water and bringing it back to Earth is incredibly tricky.

We have sampled from the back of comets in the coma and brought back the minerals that were actually in that comet meritorious, but not the ices.

To actually freeze a sample and bring it back is really complicated and really expensive, most likely.

It's hard to bring back the volatiles and the ices and stuff because you've got to keep them cold the whole time and keep them cold coming through the atmosphere and then not interact with their Earth too much.

Actually, this brings, stop me if you want, but this brings sort of a square root of one question is that the OSIRIS-REx mission is a special class of missions, which is a sample return mission.

of which if we don't include the Cold War Apollo and Luna samples, we've only had a couple of handfuls of those in the course of history.

Basically three of them by the US, two by Japan, and two by China.

So you're looking at basically a large sack of potatoes of extraterrestrial material that was brought back to Earth, roughly eight pounds or so of material,

That was a little over $2 billion worth of money spent to get these samples back for a scientific community that conservatively probably only 100, maybe, well, let's say 100.

maybe 1,500 people in the world work full-time at trying to understand.

I don't have a problem with that.

Last year, an American people spent $4 billion on candy for Halloween.