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[music]

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analytical lab. I work on analytical astrochemistry

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which means I'm trying to understand the chemical makeup of extraterrestrial

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materials--things like meteorites and comets. So, I'm looking for the ingredients for life

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--things like amino acids and nucleobases that are important to life on Earth,

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and we're trying to understand where they came from and how they're distributed throughout the solar system.

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Our biggest discovery that we did, uh, was looking at this cometary

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material that was returned from NASA's Stardust mission, and the Stardust mission

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--it went up, rendezvoused with a comet, brought back very small amounts

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of material--comet material and comet-exposed material...we had basically one

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shot at looking at this, and it was really pushing our limits of detection. So I spent

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about two years optimizing our technique, y'know, really rehearsing

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and practicing, getting everything as perfect as possible before

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the one day of doing measurements. It's sort of all leading up to one big

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game, one big day. And also, just working with meteorites, and working with the cometary

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material, I'm working with something that's four and a half billion years old that very

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few people ever get to play with and to...the few days

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of being able to do the actual measurements make up for all of the

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rehearsals that it takes. [beeping]

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[beeping]