Alan Stern Quotes

The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.
The solar system is completely wide open. Almost anywhere we go, I'm sure we would learn a lot.
There are lots of really interesting little planets out there in the Kuiper Belt, but Pluto's the only one that's got all the cool attributes.
There was a time when Pluto - which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led - was considered the last planet. We now know there are thousands of other - possibly inhabited - planets.
To keep everyone invested in your vision, you have to back up a little bit and really analyze who the different stakeholders are and what they individually respond to.
To say that what a planet is doesn't matter would be to imply that a planetary scientist couldn't explain to someone what the field is about.
Typically in science, individual scientists make up their minds about scientific fact or theory one at a time. We don't take votes. We just don't vote on quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, why the sky is blue, or anything else.
We made more than just scientific discoveries... we rediscovered how much people love exploration.
We really just didn't realize the diversity of planetary types in our solar system. Pluto looked like a misfit because it was the only one we saw. And just as a Chihuahua is still a dog, these ice dwarfs are still planetary bodies. They're large enough to make themselves round by self gravity, and they surely pass the test of planethood.
We were very surprised to find out that Pluto is still geologically alive. It has upended our ideas of how planetary geophysics works.
We're going to find Marses and maybe Earths out in the solar system's attic of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt.
We're in the space exploration business, and the outer solar system is a wild, wooly place. We haven't explored it very well.
When I started working with NASA in 1989 as part of a mission to send spacecraft to Pluto, I knew it would take at least 10-15 years to see results of my efforts.
When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go down a long list of how often I've been surprised by the richness of nature.
Whether there's even an ocean on Pluto deep inside is a question I hope New Horizons can address in indirect ways.
Why would you listen to an astronomer about a planet?
You could not have predicted the amazing discoveries at Pluto, even though we have been to a couple of objects in the solar system that were at least a little analogous to Pluto.
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AuthorName
Alan Stern
Profession
Scientist
BirthDate
22 November, 1957
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