Harold Connolly Jr.

Absolutely.

Table salt is in the...

Rocks from Bennu.

It's in the rocks from Rugu.

Well, yes and no, actually, because I'm the kind of geologist that's called a petrologist, and my job is to tell the stories that the rock contain.

And that means looking at them with my eye, looking at them with a microscope, as Neil said, and then actually cutting them and polishing them and looking at them with a special microscope, either one that's optical, that sees through to the thin coatings of the rock on a

basically a glass slide, or put them in an electron microscope or a scanning electron microscope, where then you begin to analyze in detail their composition of the minerals and how the rocks, the minerals arrange themselves and why they're the way they are.

All these little details, it's like being a detective.

The tiniest little clue

may actually open up a whole world of being able to understand geology.

Now, other folks, other scientists do dissolve samples.

But if you dissolve the sample without knowing what you dissolved, other than it came from this mountain, I mean, you know, how many different layers of rock are in the mountain?

And you say it came from that mountain.

Well, I don't know where it came from.

That doesn't help you recreate the geology and then put it into context of a special question such as, you know, looking at the potential origins of what we know is life.

So, uh,

That's a very good point you raise.

And the problem with the organic chemistry, not a problem, but the challenge is that you have to know what the rock is that you're analyzing.

What processes, geologic processes has it been through?

In order to know the geologic processes that rock has been to, in this case, an apparent body that was probably the size of Ceres, the asteroid Ceres, for example, that