Alan Stern Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pluto is the new Mars.

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.

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.

Pluto and its brethren are the most populous class of planets in our solar system.

There are lots of really interesting little planets out there in the Kuiper Belt, but Pluto's the only one that's got all the cool attributes.

You could not have predicted the amazing discoveries at Pluto, even though we have been to a couple of objects in the solar system that were at least a little analogous to Pluto.

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

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

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.

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

Small bodies in our solar system, like comets and asteroids, help us understand how the solar system formed and provide opportunities to advance exploration.

My field is called planetary science.

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

I call Pluto the harbinger.

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 think when people see Pluto revealed by New Horizons, its satellite system, its complex surface, its atmosphere, I think they'll have a hard time saying 'That's not a planet' because it obviously will be, and I think most people are already coming to that opinion anyway, but I think that's really going to drive it home viscerally.

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.

Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system.