Transcripts of jamie_cook_ipod_lg



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[music] Jamie Cook: I'm Jaime Elsila Cook...I'm an astrochemist, and I work in the astrobiology analytical lab. I work on analytical astrochemistry which means I'm trying to understand the chemical makeup of extraterrestrial materials--things like meteorites and comets. So, I'm looking for the ingredients for life --things like amino acids and nucleobases that are important to life on Earth, and we're trying to understand where they came from and how they're distributed throughout the solar system. Our biggest discovery that we did, uh, was looking at this cometary material that was returned from NASA's Stardust mission, and the Stardust mission --it went up, rendezvoused with a comet, brought back very small amounts of material--comet material and comet-exposed material...we had basically one shot at looking at this, and it was really pushing our limits of detection. So I spent about two years optimizing our technique, y'know, really rehearsing and practicing, getting everything as perfect as possible before the one day of doing measurements. It's sort of all leading up to one big game, one big day. And also, just working with meteorites, and working with the cometary material, I'm working with something that's four and a half billion years old that very few people ever get to play with and to...the few days of being able to do the actual measurements make up for all of the rehearsals that it takes. 

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