Alan Stern Quotes
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New Horizons is a very high-tech, small, roughly 1,000-pound spacecraft with the most powerful battery of scientific instrumentation ever brought to bear on a first reconnaissance mission.
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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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CSF and its members believe strongly in the exploration of space of all kinds, including commercial purposes.
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I actually started my career in planetary science with a master's thesis on Pluto.
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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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Every mission has life-or-death moments.
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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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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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A river is a river, independent of whether there are other rivers nearby. In science, we call things what they are based on their attributes, not what they're next to.
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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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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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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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The solar system is completely wide open. Almost anywhere we go, I'm sure we would learn a lot.
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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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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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The first mission to Mars did not expect to find craters and river valleys, and yet they did. The first mission to Jupiter didn't expect to find ocean worlds and volcano worlds, but they did.
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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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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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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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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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I think if you were between maybe 6 and 16, there was nothing like Apollo, and I wonder if there can be something like that again. We'll just have to see.
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I'm the one who originally coined the term 'dwarf planet,' back in the nineteen-nineties.
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I just think it's patently absurd for scientists to categorize objects on the basis of the numbers of objects that they can remember.