Solar System Exploration Quotes

No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings; it's this world or nothing. That's a very powerful perception.

New Horizons isn't just visiting Pluto; it's visiting this entire region. Whatever it finds, this will be a signal moment for planetary exploration - the capstone to our first reconnaissance of the planets of our solar system.

Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and, until Cassini had arrived, there was the largest single expanse of unexplored terrain that we had remaining in our solar system.

Mars is the only place in the solar system where it's possible for life to become multi-planetarian.

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.

Among the plausible niches for extraterrestrial life in our solar system, the clouds of Venus are among the most accessible and the least well explained.

The Moon and Mars were the two most likely candidates for life in the solar system; what exists beyond our solar system is mere guesswork.

Kepler's blown the lid off everything we know about extra-solar planets.

Water-based life is very much an Earth-centric view, and we can push the envelope on that here in our own solar system. We have the methane seas of Titan.

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.

The discovery in 1846 of the planet Neptune was a dramatic and spectacular achievement of mathematical astronomy. The very existence of this new member of the solar system, and its exact location, were demonstrated with pencil and paper; there was left to observers only the routine task of pointing their telescopes at the spot the mathematicians had marked.

Here on Earth, we're exposed to asteroids hitting the Earth, eventual changes in the Sun, changes in the Earth's climate, things we're doing to the Earth's climate. If we want to survive, we need to become a multi-planet species. That's further down the road, but the first wave is going to be the explorers.

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.

There are thousands of asteroids whose orbit in the Solar System crosses that of Earth. And we have a little acronym for them - NEOs: near Earth objects. And our biggest goal is to try to catalogue them, so we know in advance if one is going to put us at risk.

I think Pluto has to be considered among the places in the solar system that are possible homes for life.

We're working to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. Accomplishing this mission will take time, and we're working on it methodically.

It's time for the human race to enter the solar system.

Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology.

What the hell happened to Pluto?!

The solar system should be viewed as our backyard, not as some sequence of destinations that we do one at a time.

What we're learning is that the sun and its warmth isn't the only way to get warmth in the solar system, and we've been thinking that for some time.

I expect New Horizons will see more that Hubble cannot see.

Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favourite of the Sun's children.

I hope that vigorous space exploration continues and that humankind will have a space station that resides between Earth and the moon. Outside the gravitational field of Earth, we could launch robotic spacecraft to other destinations in our solar system.

The first mission to Mars did not expect to find craters and river valleys, and yet they did. The first mission to Jupiter didn't expect to find ocean worlds and volcano worlds, but they did.