planetary discovery Quotes

The exploration of the planets is now closer to us in time than the exploration of Africa by Stanley and Livingstone.

When we discover New Earth - a planet we could call home - the question of the 'plurality of worlds' will come front and center, reminding us yet again that we are not the center of the universe.

A 'serious' scientist in 1992 or 1993 had to admit the possibility that planets were really rare, that most stars might not have planets. We've gone from there to here - where most stars have planets.

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.

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

Too many people view on [space exploration] as a luxury rather than as a fundamental driver to stimulate interest in science to everyone in the educational pipeline. It's vital to our prosperity and security.

Getting a team of scientists on Mars could be transformative.

A lot of the science fiction that I grew up reading was written when we still thought that Venus might be an oceanic planet.

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.

If it's a new planet, sign me up. I'm tired of driving around the block, boldly going where hundreds have gone before in orbit around earth-give me a place to go and I'll go.

You may have heard this, that NASA discovered water on Mars When he heard about the water on Mars, President Bush said, 'Is it regular or unleaded?'

So we say, oh, my goodness; we think we've found another Earth-like planet. We will start trying to figure out how to get there. And I have this strong belief that whatever we think we can do, whatever we can dream, we can do.

I think sometime we will go to Mars and I think we'll explore it with humans sometime, but I think it's really wise to do all the robotic exploration ahead of time and learn as much as possible. Once we have learned as much as possible with the robots, then that's the time to send people, and let them then continue the research that the robots have started.

Our field is very focused on finding Earth 2.0, and anything we can do to narrow the search is helpful.

Human technology has made it to Mars. We are transmitting gorgeous pictures from it. Yet we have not explored our own planet. Two-thirds of it is covered with oceans that are still mysterious places.

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.

Young man, I am afraid you are wasting your time. If there were any more planets they would have been found long before this.

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.

What we initially conceived as a fairly simple geologic experiment on Mars ultimately turned into humanity's first real overland expedition across another planet. Spirit explored just as we would have, seeing a distant hill, climbing it, and showing us the vista from the summit. And she did it in a way that allowed everyone on Earth to be part of the adventure.

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

No one predicted Mercury would be a planetary core with the mantle stripped off. No one predicted volcanoes on the Jovian moons, or oceans on the inside of them. I can tell you, for every single planet, huge 'we never guessed that' things.

Astronomers have discovered a planet that is twice the size of earth and made of diamonds. President Obama says the planet may be inhabited by aliens not paying their fair share.

We went to the moon and discovered Earth.

Because of Hubble and other telescopes, we've now discovered that there are probably planets around every star, or virtually every star. There are solar systems around most stars. And the fact that we're here on a planet, Earth, means that it's likely there's lots of other Earths out there.

In 1999, my team discovered that the star Upsilon Andromedae was circled by three gas-giant planets - the first distant multiplanet system ever found. That same year, other researchers observed the first 'transit' of an exoplanet - a planet blocking out a small fraction of the starlight as it passes in front of the star.