John M. Grunsfeld Quotes

We do have, and will continue to have an unquenchable curiosity to understand our Solar System.

My field is called planetary science.

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

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.

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.

Most of the solar system resides beyond the orbits of the asteroids. There is more to learn there about general planetary processes than on Mars.

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.

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

The solar system is completely wide open. Almost anywhere we go, I'm sure we would learn a lot.

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

I agree that we should go back to the moon and on to Mars. We should treat all objects in the solar system, including comets and asteroids, as exploration targets.

Some things are only capable of being done in space. Examples of that are looking at our Earth from that far away, and understanding the entire processes of storms and weather patterns, and oceans, and coastlines.

The first trillionaire in the world will be the person who mines asteroids.

We don't use Hubble to stare at Jupiter unless there's a special event or some special reason.

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

Hubble wasn't designed to look at objects in our solar system, but after it was launched, astronomers realized that with just a little bit of modification to the software, it could look at solar system objects.

No matter how you measure it, whether you measure the amount of mass or you measure the number of bodies, most of our solar system exists out beyond the orbits of the asteroids. So we could not have claimed to know our own solar system until Voyager had toured the giant planets.

We don't know that Venus had oceans, but there's every reason to believe it did.

We go to learn about our solar system, to search for life, and to understand what happened to Mars so we avoid it ourselves.

I do not expect NASA to go out and build settlements and colonies. I do not expect them to give SpaceX all the money needed to colonize Mars. I do not expect them to realize the future of humanity is contingent on harvesting the wealth of the solar system overnight and suddenly subsidize my asteroid mining project.

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

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.

I'm really into space. When I was four years old, I used to pray to the stars and look at the moon.

Hubble isn't just a satellite; it's about humanity's quest for knowledge.

Space is really domain expansion.