Alan Stern Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Never go to Pluto, it's a Mickey Mouse planet.

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.

We're just one rock surrounded by this immense universe.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

All the nine-planet people out there: Get over it. There's eight.

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

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

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.

Pluto is the new Mars.

I call Pluto the harbinger.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 going to find Marses and maybe Earths out in the solar system's attic of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt.

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.