Alan Stern Quotes

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

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

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

Pluto is the new Mars.

I call Pluto the harbinger.

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.

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

There is a planet named Pluto, but we don't have one named Goofy. Goofy would be a good name for this planet. It certainly qualifies.

I'd love to go into space again if there were a mission to Mars. I'd also love to go to a completely different planetary system, out of our solar system.

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.

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

I loved Pluto. I was totally fascinated by Pluto. When I started in astronomy, I started looking at this region of the sky because I thought it was so interesting out there.

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

'Earth' is a silly name for this planet.

It's a brilliant surface in that sunlight. The horizon seems quite close to you because the curvature is so much more pronounced than here on earth. It's an interesting place to be. I recommend it.

One of the things I do know is we know very little about our universe. Even though we think we know a lot, and we do know a lot more than we used to, we have a lot to learn about our universe.

When we explore other planets, we learn a lot about our own.

Jupiter, Pluto, pick a planet: we can go there. I just got a bit more work to do in the music industry, and we're going to space, baby.

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

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

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.

You think of floating on a rock in space as so alien, but that's exactly what we're doing.

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

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.