Alan Stern Quotes

Pluto has a very interesting history, and there is a lot of work that we need to do to understand this very complicated place.

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.

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.

Pluto is the new Mars.

As a planetary scientist, I don't know what else to call Pluto: It's big and round and thousands of miles wide.

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.

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

Why can't Pluto be a planet? Some people like Pluto. And if it doesn't exist then they don't have a favorite planet. Right? Please write back but not in cursive because I can't read cursive.

There is a planet named Pluto, but we don't have one named Goofy. Goofy would be a good name for this planet. It certainly qualifies.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

I tend to think of Pluto and its moons as presents sitting under a Christmas tree. They're wrapped, and from Earth all we can do is look at the boxes to see whether they're light or heavy, to see if something maybe jiggles a bit inside. We're seeing intriguing things, but we really don't know what's in there.

The planets. Now footnote, I'm including Pluto in the planets, because I think it's terrible what they did to Pluto. And it's still a planet to me. I grew up with Pluto as a planet, it will always be a planet.

Never go to Pluto, it's a Mickey Mouse planet.

I loved Pluto. I was totally fascinated by Pluto. When I started in astronomy, I started looking at this region of the sky because I thought it was so interesting out there.

'Earth' is a silly name for this planet.

The cosmic game changed forever in 1992. Before then, logic told us that there had to be other planets besides the nine (if you still count poor Pluto) in our solar system, but until that year, when two astronomers detected faint, telltale radio signals in the constellation Virgo, we had no hard evidence of their existence.