Alan Stern Quotes

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Alan Stern

Profession : Scientist

Birth : November 22, 1957

I tell public audiences, don't go to a podiatrist for brain surgery; don't go to an astronomer for planetary science.

Alan Stern

It's very hard to motivate yourself and others with only one goal - particularly if it's complex and you might not get there until years down the road. That's why intermediate goals are so important.

Alan Stern

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

Alan Stern

Even in our deep ocean, there are ecosystems at work with no light whatsoever down in the deepest portions of the oceanic abyss.

Alan Stern

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.

Alan Stern

I call Pluto the harbinger.

Alan Stern

America's space program has been the envy and inspiration of the world. It has made landmark scientific discoveries that are a lasting legacy of this nation's greatness. It has studied Earth in ways no other nation can match.

Alan Stern

Competition-driven innovation and price pressure that commercial practices foster can only make human spaceflight ever more common and U.S. leadership in this domain ever clearer.

Alan Stern

It is only by freeing NASA from routine human transport to low-Earth orbit that we can afford to once again see American astronauts exploring distant worlds.

Alan Stern

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

Alan Stern

I'm the one who originally coined the term 'dwarf planet,' back in the nineteen-nineties.

Alan Stern

CSF and its members believe strongly in the exploration of space of all kinds, including commercial purposes.

Alan Stern

Pluto is the new Mars.

Alan Stern

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

Alan Stern

People ask, 'What are the scientific questions you're going to answer?' New Horizons doesn't have any of those; it's purely about raw exploration... We're not 'rewriting the textbook' - we're writing the textbook from scratch.

Alan Stern

We were very surprised to find out that Pluto is still geologically alive. It has upended our ideas of how planetary geophysics works.

Alan Stern

We made more than just scientific discoveries... we rediscovered how much people love exploration.

Alan Stern

To keep everyone invested in your vision, you have to back up a little bit and really analyze who the different stakeholders are and what they individually respond to.

Alan Stern

Just because Pluto or comets aren't as big as Jupiter doesn't mean they are not scientifically important - indeed, just the reverse is often true. Sometimes, great things come in small packages.

Alan Stern

The New Horizons Pluto mission will be the first mission to a binary object and will help us understand everything from the origin of Earth's moon to the physics of mass transfer between binary stars.

Alan Stern