AGU’s Walter Sullivan Award is given annually for work with a prep time of more than one week. This year, however, it’s being awarded for a story that has been eons in the making: the murky origins of chondrules, tiny glassy inclusions in certain meteorites that rank among the oldest solid objects to emerge within our solar system. Chondrules, it seems, are a microcosm of stellar and planetary formation; understand how they came to be during our own star’s infancy, and you may have gone a considerable way toward gaining answers to the greater question of how suns and worlds alike coalesce throughout the universe. It was fitting, then, that this story of some of the “first things” around the Sun was also the very first feature for Scientific American written by Jonathan O’Callaghan, one of our most prized contributors and one of the best space-centric science communicators working today. Jonathan is a consummate journalist — enormously productive, relentless in his reporting, crystal clear in his prose and above all deeply curious. He has a particularly remarkable knack for knowing not only what makes a good story but also when it is best told. In the case of this article, “Asteroid Dust from Hayabusa2 Could Solve a Mystery of Planet Creation,” the catalytic calendrical event was the return to Earth of precious samples from a space rock, Ryugu, by a Japanese spacecraft on 6 December 2020. Jonathan’s interest in the topic was initially piqued after he stumbled across a few obscure chondrule-related studies while combing through thousands of presentation abstracts for a science conference in early summer of 2020. Soon, he realized that the impending climax of the Hayabusa2 mission also offered a unique opportunity to spotlight the science of chondrules because eventual studies of the returned samples would reveal their presence — or absence — from Ryugu. Either way, the results would provide important new clues about the conditions of chondrules’ primordial births. Most journalists would shy away from such a complex and challenging topic, daunted by the dry technical details and subtleties that can all too easily stifle the crafting of a compelling narrative. Jonathan, as usual, did just the opposite, diving into the depths of the international community of chondrule researchers. Consulting many of this rarefied subfield’s brightest minds, he deftly wove a tale combining several of their fascinating personal stories with the broader research landscape they inhabit, revealing its surprising history, current status and hopefully bright future.

— Lee Billings Scientific American New York, New York