Alan Stern Quotes
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We made more than just scientific discoveries... we rediscovered how much people love exploration.
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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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My field is called planetary science.
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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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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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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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I can't imagine how many kids around the world will look at pictures of Pluto and think, 'I want to grow up to be a scientist.'
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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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That so many binary or quasi-binary KBOs exist came as a real surprise to the research community.
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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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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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CSF and its members believe strongly in the exploration of space of all kinds, including commercial purposes.
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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've been on 26 space missions; they range from suborbital to orbital to shuttle experiments to planetary missions.
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Human beings have long wondered whether they are alone in the universe.
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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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The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.
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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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Whether there's even an ocean on Pluto deep inside is a question I hope New Horizons can address in indirect ways.
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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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Even in our deep ocean, there are ecosystems at work with no light whatsoever down in the deepest portions of the oceanic abyss.