Thomas Kruijer

It's basically locked in there.

And using sophisticated methods that we use at the lab and have at our disposal, that allows us to measure the abundances of isotopes, individual isotopes within a rock.

So of a particular element, but we can measure the isotopes of many different elements.

And we have multiple such mass spectrometers at our disposal here at Livermore Lab.

You have meteorites falling on Earth.

They fell maybe 50 years ago, maybe 100 years ago from another body.

They passed through the atmosphere, they traveled all the way to Earth.

And then you have NASA taking a spacecraft to another body and returned some material by spacecraft.

It is really a special class, and there's only very little material of that in collections on Earth.

And on top of that...

The material, of course, that's returned by a spacecraft is much more pristine, because when a meteorite falls on Earth, it has to pass through the atmosphere.

That's quite remarkable, because that means that even though, as of now, we only know for certain that life exists on Earth, at least some of the building blocks for life are also present in these meteorites.

And what that exactly means, I think we don't know yet, but it is certainly a worthwhile pursuit.

If you cannot simulate or compute your way to a discovery, you need to actually measure these samples.

It's an empirical science, we do measurements, and that will continue to remain important.