Alan Stern Quotes

Pluto and its brethren are the most populous class of planets in our solar system.

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.

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.

If you go to planetary science meetings and hear technical talks on Pluto, you will hear experts calling it a planet every day.

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.

I actually started my career in planetary science with a master's thesis on Pluto.

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.

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.

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.

Going to the Kuiper Belt is like an archaeological dig into the history of the solar system.

Why can't Pluto be a planet? Some people like Pluto. And if it doesn't exist then they don't have a favorite planet. Right? Please write back but not in cursive because I can't read cursive.

I'm the one who originally coined the term 'dwarf planet,' back in the nineteen-nineties.

Pluto is the new Mars.

I call Pluto the harbinger.

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.

No one planet can tell us everything about the universe, but Neptune seems to hold more than its share of information about the formation of our own solar system - as well as the solar systems beyond.

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.

The planets. Now footnote, I'm including Pluto in the planets, because I think it's terrible what they did to Pluto. And it's still a planet to me. I grew up with Pluto as a planet, it will always be a planet.

Benjamin Franklin maintained that every star is a sun, and every sun nourishes a 'chorus of worlds' just like ours.

The cosmic game changed forever in 1992. Before then, logic told us that there had to be other planets besides the nine (if you still count poor Pluto) in our solar system, but until that year, when two astronomers detected faint, telltale radio signals in the constellation Virgo, we had no hard evidence of their existence.

Pluto has a very interesting history, and there is a lot of work that we need to do to understand this very complicated place.

The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.

That so many binary or quasi-binary KBOs exist came as a real surprise to the research community.

Liquids may have existed on the surface of Pluto in the past.

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.