Alan Stern Quotes

My field is called planetary science.

The questions that we scientist have about Saturn's rings are the questions that an ordinary person might be moved to ask when first seeing them, you know. What caused them? How did they get there? How long have they been around? How long are they going to last?

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

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.

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

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

The sun and its retinue of planets drift as a group through the vast gulfs of space that separate the stars.

Planets are too dim to be detected with existing equipment, far away, except in these very special circumstances where they're seen by their gravitational effect.

There's a lot to do in space. I want to learn more about the greenhouse effect on Venus, about whether there was life on Mars, about the environment in which Earth and the Sun is immersed, the behavior of the Sun.

I am not a scientist. I have never analyzed the far reaches of the solar system through the lens of a telescope nor scrutinized cancer cells under a microscope.

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

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.

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

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.

As a planetary system, Saturn holds the greatest promise for answering questions that have a far broader scientific reach than Saturn itself.

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

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.

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.

Planets look about the same here as they do to you on the Earth because we really aren't that much closer. Our home, the International Space Station, orbits around the Earth at about 200 miles.

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.

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

Before 1995, the only planets we knew about were the planets in our solar system.

I am sitting here 93 million miles from the sun on a rounded rock which is spinning at the rate of 1000 miles an hour... and my head pointing down into space with nothing between me and infinity but something called gravity which I can't even understand, and which you can't even buy any place so as to have some stored away for a gravityless day.