Carolyn Porco Quotes

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.

This is in a real sense the capstone of the initial missions to explore the planets. Pluto, its moons and this part of the solar system are such mysteries that New Horizons will rewrite all of the textbooks.

Landing on the moon was a dream that millions of kids have had for hundreds of years.

Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god, but a great rock, and the sun a hot rock.

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.

Whenever I gaze up at the moon, I feel like I'm on a time machine. I am back to that precious pinpoint of time, standing on the foreboding - yet beautiful - Sea of Tranquility. I could see our shining blue planet Earth poised in the darkness of space.

In future, children won't perceive the stars as mere twinkling points of light: they'll learn that each is a 'Sun', orbited by planets fully as interesting as those in our Solar system.

Go to the moon - that's my dream.

What planet are you on?

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

I'm not really into sci-fi movies, but I'm into the science of space a lot. I love astronomy and thinking about the nothingness of the everythingness of space.

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 may have a tacit understanding of how our solar system works, but watching the sun disappear behind the moon reminds us of the vastness of space and the enduring mysteries of the universe we inhabit.

Mars does not belong to 'America,' nor to Earth, nor to human beings.

Pluto is the new Mars.

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.

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

Space is really domain expansion.

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

It changes your perspective to be able to look out the window and see the planet. One of the thoughts that I had when I first got up here was, 'We really do live on a planet, and we are in a solar system, and we are flying through space right now.' I mean, this is something that you know, obviously, but to see the planet - it's amazing.

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.

To set foot on the soil of the asteroids, to lift by hand a rock from the Moon, to observe Mars from a distance of several tens of kilometers, to land on its satellite or even on its surface, what can be more fantastic? From the moment of using rocket devices a new great era will begin in astronomy: the epoch of the more intensive study of the firmament.

Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules — and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

And fast by, hanging in a golden chain, This pendent world, in bigness as a star Of smallest magnitude, close by the moon.