Alan Stern Quotes
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We're in the space exploration business, and the outer solar system is a wild, wooly place. We haven't explored it very well.
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My field is called planetary science.
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I actually started my career in planetary science with a master's thesis on Pluto.
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In the mind of the public, the word 'planet' carries a significance lacking in other words used to describe planetary bodies... many members of the public assume that alleged 'non-planets' cease to be interesting enough to warrant scientific exploration.
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Every mission has life-or-death moments.
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I've been on 26 space missions; they range from suborbital to orbital to shuttle experiments to planetary missions.
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One of the implications of the discovery of the Kuiper Belt and its many small planets is that many scientists now think of the solar system as having not two but three zones.
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CSF and its members believe strongly in the exploration of space of all kinds, including commercial purposes.
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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.
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Just because Pluto or comets aren't as big as Jupiter doesn't mean they are not scientifically important - indeed, just the reverse is often true. Sometimes, great things come in small packages.
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The big lesson of planetary science is when you do a first reconnaissance of a new kind of object, you should expect the unexpected.
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It's interesting - Pluto's almost a brand unto itself. It's the farthest. It's the most diminutive of the classical planets. It's been maligned by astronomers. It's always the one with all the question marks in the back of the textbook in the table. I think children identify with it because it's smaller, kind of cute.
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In science, we take large numbers of disparate facts and reduce them to see patterns. We use the patterns to reduce the amount of information. It's the reason we name species and genera and families in biology. It's also the reason we have names for certain types of geological features and so on in other fields.
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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.
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If you go to planetary science meetings and hear technical talks on Pluto, you will hear experts calling it a planet every day.
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America's space program has been the envy and inspiration of the world. It has made landmark scientific discoveries that are a lasting legacy of this nation's greatness. It has studied Earth in ways no other nation can match.
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By going to Pluto, we have a chance to anchor, with real data, models of the early evolution of Earth's atmosphere.
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The solar system is completely wide open. Almost anywhere we go, I'm sure we would learn a lot.
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It says something very deep about humans and our society, something very good about us, that we've invested our time and treasure in building a machine that can fly across three billion miles of space to explore the Pluto system.
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The Kuiper belt region, which I call the third zone because it lies beyond the rocky terrestrial planets and beyond the giant planets, is a bizarre frontier.
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I tell public audiences, don't go to a podiatrist for brain surgery; don't go to an astronomer for planetary science.
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Pluto is the new Mars.
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That so many binary or quasi-binary KBOs exist came as a real surprise to the research community.
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No one predicted Mercury would be a planetary core with the mantle stripped off. No one predicted volcanoes on the Jovian moons, or oceans on the inside of them. I can tell you, for every single planet, huge 'we never guessed that' things.