Alan Stern Quotes
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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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We made more than just scientific discoveries... we rediscovered how much people love exploration.
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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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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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CSF and its members believe strongly in the exploration of space of all kinds, including commercial purposes.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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I've been on 26 space missions; they range from suborbital to orbital to shuttle experiments to planetary missions.
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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 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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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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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 Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.
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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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I'm the one who originally coined the term 'dwarf planet,' back in the nineteen-nineties.
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Human beings have long wondered whether they are alone in the universe.
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People ask, 'What are the scientific questions you're going to answer?' New Horizons doesn't have any of those; it's purely about raw exploration... We're not 'rewriting the textbook' - we're writing the textbook from scratch.
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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.