Alan Stern Quotes
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We're going to find Marses and maybe Earths out in the solar system's attic of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt.
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CASIS has to succeed because for it not to succeed would be a huge setback for the International Space Station program.
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At the time of Apollo 11, I was a grade-schooler, and I remember every time an Apollo mission would take place that, like a lot of little boys, I'd gather in front of the TV for hours and hours and hours with my little brother.
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When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go down a long list of how often I've been surprised by the richness of nature.
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Pluto has strong atmospheric cycles: it snows on the surface; the snows sublimate and go back into the atmosphere each 248 year orbit.
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The Kuiper Belt is the largest mapped structure in our planetary system, three times as big as all the territory from the sun out to Neptune's orbit.
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To say that what a planet is doesn't matter would be to imply that a planetary scientist couldn't explain to someone what the field is about.
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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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Typically in science, individual scientists make up their minds about scientific fact or theory one at a time. We don't take votes. We just don't vote on quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, why the sky is blue, or anything else.
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Either data supports the observations or they don't. Voting doesn't work in science.
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Why would you listen to an astronomer about a planet?
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A miniature poodle is not not a dog just because it's miniature.
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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.
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The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.
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Liquids may have existed on the surface of Pluto in the past.
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Science doesn't work by voting. Did people vote on the theory of relativity? No! It's either right or it's wrong. Do we vote on whether genetics is a good theory or not? Of course not.
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Going to the Kuiper Belt is like an archaeological dig into the history of the solar system.
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People dig exploration.
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The costs of badly-run NASA projects are paid for with cutbacks or delays in NASA projects that didn't go over budget. Hence the guilty are rewarded and the innocent are punished.
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Having a diverse suite of U.S.-manned spaceflight systems to access space is inherently robust.
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It shouldn't be so difficult to determine what a planet is. When you're watching a science fiction show like 'Star Trek' and they show up at some object in space and turn on the viewfinder, the audience and the people in the show know immediately whether it's a planet or a star or a comet or an asteroid.
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If you put Earth out beyond Neptune, you wouldn't be able to call it a planet because it couldn't clear its zone.
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One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.
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It is only by freeing NASA from routine human transport to low-Earth orbit that we can afford to once again see American astronauts exploring distant worlds.