Harold Connolly Jr.

I shouldn't say normal.

I shouldn't say normal.

There's nothing normal about it.

Right.

Sample.

Typical.

And then we get to the, I'll just tell you real quick.

Then we get to the lab.

We opened up the canister.

And the first thing you do as a geologist is you look at it with your eye.

The most important thing is that it's a rock.

Before you begin to slice it up to make polished sections, before you send it off to the folks at Goddard Space White Center to analyze organics, before they dissolve it up to get their analysis, you must know what the rock is because the context is absolutely critical.

Without the context of the rock, you may not be able to interpret your results.

100%.

We had, if I may, we had an amazing aha moment when we discovered that

which we should have more or less known we were going to discover, but because we find so few of these minerals in meteorites that we pick up on Earth, it didn't kind of process that the asteroid samples could be rich in evaporite minerals.

What is an evaporite mineral?

A mineral that forms in a water-rich solution as that water evaporates.

A classic example, table salt.

Right.