Alan Stern Quotes
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Just because Pluto orbits with many other dwarf planets doesn't change what it is, just as whether an object is a mountain or not doesn't depend on whether it's in a group or in isolation.
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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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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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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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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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I've been on 26 space missions; they range from suborbital to orbital to shuttle experiments to planetary missions.
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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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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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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 solar system is completely wide open. Almost anywhere we go, I'm sure we would learn a lot.
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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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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.
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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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Are governments the only entities that can build human spacecraft? No - actually, every human spacecraft ever built for NASA was built by private industry.
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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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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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Human beings have long wondered whether they are alone in the universe.
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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 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.