- Evidence
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- Nov 07, 2020
Alan Stern Quotes
Most Famous Alan Stern Quotes of All Time!
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Forward
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- Nov 07, 2020
As a researcher, I look forward to being able to do space science in a space environment.
- Little Brother
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Nothing
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Cool
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- Nov 07, 2020
Pluto is still active four and a half billion years into its history. It was expected that small planets like Pluto would cool off long ago and not still be showing geological activity. Pluto is, in fact, showing numerous examples of geological activity on a massive scale across the planet.
- Small
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Interesting
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- Nov 07, 2020
There are lots of really interesting little planets out there in the Kuiper Belt, but Pluto's the only one that's got all the cool attributes.
- Light
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- Nov 07, 2020
I tend to think of Pluto and its moons as presents sitting under a Christmas tree. They're wrapped, and from Earth all we can do is look at the boxes to see whether they're light or heavy, to see if something maybe jiggles a bit inside. We're seeing intriguing things, but we really don't know what's in there.
- New
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- Nov 07, 2020
New Horizons isn't just visiting Pluto; it's visiting this entire region. Whatever it finds, this will be a signal moment for planetary exploration - the capstone to our first reconnaissance of the planets of our solar system.
- Master
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- Nov 07, 2020
I actually started my career in planetary science with a master's thesis on Pluto.
- Place
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- Nov 07, 2020
We're in the space exploration business, and the outer solar system is a wild, wooly place. We haven't explored it very well.
- Faraway
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- Nov 07, 2020
I like the planets because they are real places that you can go to and send machines to. Faraway astronomy - galactic astronomy and extra-galactic astronomy - is really cool stuff, but to me, it's about destinations.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
No one working as an astronomer is shackled in chains. This is a tremendous profession. There are lots of neat people, and you get to do cool things. If I had to say something negative, it's that there's often a whole lot of travel that takes me away from my children. That can be a bummer a lot of times.
- Planet
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- Nov 07, 2020
Why would you listen to an astronomer about a planet?
- Exploration
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- Nov 07, 2020
People dig exploration.
- Go
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- Nov 07, 2020
I tell public audiences, don't go to a podiatrist for brain surgery; don't go to an astronomer for planetary science.
- Diversity
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- Nov 07, 2020
We really just didn't realize the diversity of planetary types in our solar system. Pluto looked like a misfit because it was the only one we saw. And just as a Chihuahua is still a dog, these ice dwarfs are still planetary bodies. They're large enough to make themselves round by self gravity, and they surely pass the test of planethood.
- Go
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Depend
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Planet
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Belong
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- Nov 07, 2020
Back before the Kuiper Belt was discovered, Pluto did look like a misfit that didn't belong with either the terrestrials or the giant planets.
- Facts
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Everyone
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- NASA
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Our
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Look
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.'
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Earth
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- Nov 07, 2020
Pluto is as far across as Manhattan to Miami, but its atmosphere is bigger than the Earth's.
- Deep Inside
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- Nov 07, 2020
Whether there's even an ocean on Pluto deep inside is a question I hope New Horizons can address in indirect ways.
- Ecosystems
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- Nov 07, 2020
Even in our deep ocean, there are ecosystems at work with no light whatsoever down in the deepest portions of the oceanic abyss.
- Interesting
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- New
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Mission
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Children
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Pluto
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- Nov 07, 2020
I call Pluto the harbinger.
- Myself
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- Nov 07, 2020
As a scientist in charge of space sensors and entire space missions before I was at NASA, I myself was involved in projects that overran. But that's no excuse for remaining silent about this growing problem or failing to champion reform.
- Guilty
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Greatness
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Human
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- Nov 07, 2020
Are governments the only entities that can build human spacecraft? No - actually, every human spacecraft ever built for NASA was built by private industry.
- Leadership
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- Nov 07, 2020
Competition-driven innovation and price pressure that commercial practices foster can only make human spaceflight ever more common and U.S. leadership in this domain ever clearer.
- Having
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- Nov 07, 2020
Having a diverse suite of U.S.-manned spaceflight systems to access space is inherently robust.
- Only
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.
- Golden
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- Nov 07, 2020
The basic story for Golden Spike is that we discovered a way to create do-it-yourself Apollo programs for other countries.
- New
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think that one of the things that will come out of the New Horizons mission is that the public will take a look, and they won't know what else to call Pluto but a planet - and a pretty exciting one.
- Most
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- Nov 07, 2020
Pluto and its brethren are the most populous class of planets in our solar system.
- Open
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- Nov 07, 2020
The solar system is completely wide open. Almost anywhere we go, I'm sure we would learn a lot.
- Dwarf
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm the one who originally coined the term 'dwarf planet,' back in the nineteen-nineties.
- Diversity
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- Nov 07, 2020
Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system.
- Nov 07, 2020
That so many binary or quasi-binary KBOs exist came as a real surprise to the research community.
- Find
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- Nov 07, 2020
We're going to find Marses and maybe Earths out in the solar system's attic of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt.
- Exploration
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- Nov 07, 2020
CSF and its members believe strongly in the exploration of space of all kinds, including commercial purposes.
- New
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- Nov 07, 2020
Pluto is the new Mars.
- New
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- Nov 07, 2020
I expect New Horizons will see more that Hubble cannot see.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020
Pluto has a very interesting history, and there is a lot of work that we need to do to understand this very complicated place.
- Back
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- Nov 07, 2020
Pluto has strong atmospheric cycles: it snows on the surface; the snows sublimate and go back into the atmosphere each 248 year orbit.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Long
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- Nov 07, 2020
If the Pluto mission was a cat, then it would've been dead long ago because they only get nine lives, and we've had significantly more than nine stoppages and odd twists and turns.
- Find
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- Nov 07, 2020
We were very surprised to find out that Pluto is still geologically alive. It has upended our ideas of how planetary geophysics works.
- Little
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- Nov 07, 2020
You could not have predicted the amazing discoveries at Pluto, even though we have been to a couple of objects in the solar system that were at least a little analogous to Pluto.
- Love
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- Nov 07, 2020
We made more than just scientific discoveries... we rediscovered how much people love exploration.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
If two billion people wanted to watch a robot fly by Pluto, imagine what it will be like when the first humans step on Mars. It'll be the most unifying event anybody could ever put on.
- Mission
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- Nov 07, 2020
There was a time when Pluto - which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led - was considered the last planet. We now know there are thousands of other - possibly inhabited - planets.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
People know a planet when they see one, and I think that's a pretty darn good test, in fact, for planethood.
- Numbers
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- Nov 07, 2020
I just think it's patently absurd for scientists to categorize objects on the basis of the numbers of objects that they can remember.
- Hard Time
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think when people see Pluto revealed by New Horizons, its satellite system, its complex surface, its atmosphere, I think they'll have a hard time saying 'That's not a planet' because it obviously will be, and I think most people are already coming to that opinion anyway, but I think that's really going to drive it home viscerally.
- Call
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- Nov 07, 2020
As a planetary scientist, I don't know what else to call Pluto: It's big and round and thousands of miles wide.
- Beyond
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- Nov 07, 2020
If you put Earth out beyond Neptune, you wouldn't be able to call it a planet because it couldn't clear its zone.
- Front
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- Nov 07, 2020
How can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun? There are dwarf stars, but they're still considered stars.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020
Going to the Kuiper Belt is like an archaeological dig into the history of the solar system.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Mission
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- Nov 07, 2020
Every mission has life-or-death moments.
- Experiments
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- Nov 07, 2020
I've been on 26 space missions; they range from suborbital to orbital to shuttle experiments to planetary missions.
- Genera
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Planetary
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- Nov 07, 2020
My field is called planetary science.
- Moon
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- Nov 07, 2020
Just speaking for myself, I think the return of people to the Moon has a lot to offer for understanding the formation and evolution of terrestrial worlds; so would the exploration of near-Earth asteroids by people.
- Gravity
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- Nov 07, 2020
Of course Pluto is a planet: It's massive enough to have its shape controlled by gravity rather than material strength, which is the hallmark of planethood.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
Discovering that our solar system has many more planets than we ever expected, and that most of them are ice dwarfs rather than like Earth and the other rocky terrestrials, is just another step in the revolution in viewpoint that removed the Earth from the center of the physical universe and makes Earth all the more special.
- Important
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Moon
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- Nov 07, 2020
The New Horizons Pluto mission will be the first mission to a binary object and will help us understand everything from the origin of Earth's moon to the physics of mass transfer between binary stars.
- Chance
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- Nov 07, 2020