Alan Stern Quotes

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Alan Stern

Profession : Scientist

Birth : November 22, 1957

If you put Earth out beyond Neptune, you wouldn't be able to call it a planet because it couldn't clear its zone.

Alan Stern

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

Alan Stern

If you go to planetary science meetings and hear technical talks on Pluto, you will hear experts calling it a planet every day.

Alan Stern

Discovering that our solar system has many more planets than we ever expected, and that most of them are ice dwarfs rather than like Earth and the other rocky terrestrials, is just another step in the revolution in viewpoint that removed the Earth from the center of the physical universe and makes Earth all the more special.

Alan Stern

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.

Alan Stern

Just because Pluto orbits with many other dwarf planets doesn't change what it is, just as whether an object is a mountain or not doesn't depend on whether it's in a group or in isolation.

Alan Stern

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.

Alan Stern

The Kuiper Belt is the largest mapped structure in our planetary system, three times as big as all the territory from the sun out to Neptune's orbit.

Alan Stern

The costs of badly-run NASA projects are paid for with cutbacks or delays in NASA projects that didn't go over budget. Hence the guilty are rewarded and the innocent are punished.

Alan Stern

Science is really about individual experts reaching a consensus.

Alan Stern

The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.

Alan Stern

I can't imagine how many kids around the world will look at pictures of Pluto and think, 'I want to grow up to be a scientist.'

Alan Stern

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

Alan Stern

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

Alan Stern

When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go down a long list of how often I've been surprised by the richness of nature.

Alan Stern

Either data supports the observations or they don't. Voting doesn't work in science.

Alan Stern

Having a diverse suite of U.S.-manned spaceflight systems to access space is inherently robust.

Alan Stern

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.

Alan Stern

When I started working with NASA in 1989 as part of a mission to send spacecraft to Pluto, I knew it would take at least 10-15 years to see results of my efforts.

Alan Stern

As a researcher, I look forward to being able to do space science in a space environment.

Alan Stern