Alan Stern Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

Whether there's even an ocean on Pluto deep inside is a question I hope New Horizons can address in indirect ways.

Pluto is the new Mars.

When the Voyager 2 spacecraft sped through the Saturnian system more than a quarter of a century ago, it came within 90,000 kilometers of the moon Enceladus. Over the course of a few hours, its cameras returned a handful of images that confounded planetary scientists for years.

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.

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.

The universe is hilarious! Like, Venus is 900 degrees. I could tell you it melts lead. But that's not as fun as saying, 'You can cook a pizza on the windowsill in nine seconds.' And next time my fans eat pizza, they're thinking of Venus!

The public has an incredible capacity for appreciating the wonder of our planet, our solar system, our universe.

The solar system should be viewed as our backyard, not as some sequence of destinations that we do one at a time.

I refuse to accept Pluto's resignation as a planet.

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.

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.

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.

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

We've explored every type of environment in the solar system at least once.

People know a planet when they see one, and I think that's a pretty darn good test, in fact, for planethood.

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.

As a planetary scientist, I don't know what else to call Pluto: It's big and round and thousands of miles wide.

Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system.

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.

We're in the space exploration business, and the outer solar system is a wild, wooly place. We haven't explored it very well.