Alan Stern Quotes

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Alan Stern

Profession : Scientist

Birth : November 22, 1957

As a scientist in charge of space sensors and entire space missions before I was at NASA, I myself was involved in projects that overran. But that's no excuse for remaining silent about this growing problem or failing to champion reform.

Alan Stern

By going to Pluto, we have a chance to anchor, with real data, models of the early evolution of Earth's atmosphere.

Alan Stern

Liquids may have existed on the surface of Pluto in the past.

Alan Stern

People dig exploration.

Alan Stern

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.

Alan Stern

Pluto has strong atmospheric cycles: it snows on the surface; the snows sublimate and go back into the atmosphere each 248 year orbit.

Alan Stern

Pluto is as far across as Manhattan to Miami, but its atmosphere is bigger than the Earth's.

Alan Stern

People know a planet when they see one, and I think that's a pretty darn good test, in fact, for planethood.

Alan Stern

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.

Alan Stern

A river is a river, independent of whether there are other rivers nearby. In science, we call things what they are based on their attributes, not what they're next to.

Alan Stern

If two billion people wanted to watch a robot fly by Pluto, imagine what it will be like when the first humans step on Mars. It'll be the most unifying event anybody could ever put on.

Alan Stern

The basic story for Golden Spike is that we discovered a way to create do-it-yourself Apollo programs for other countries.

Alan Stern

It says something very deep about humans and our society, something very good about us, that we've invested our time and treasure in building a machine that can fly across three billion miles of space to explore the Pluto system.

Alan Stern

New Horizons is a very high-tech, small, roughly 1,000-pound spacecraft with the most powerful battery of scientific instrumentation ever brought to bear on a first reconnaissance mission.

Alan Stern

At the time of Apollo 11, I was a grade-schooler, and I remember every time an Apollo mission would take place that, like a lot of little boys, I'd gather in front of the TV for hours and hours and hours with my little brother.

Alan Stern

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

Alan Stern

Are governments the only entities that can build human spacecraft? No - actually, every human spacecraft ever built for NASA was built by private industry.

Alan Stern

Why would you listen to an astronomer about a planet?

Alan Stern

CASIS has to succeed because for it not to succeed would be a huge setback for the International Space Station program.

Alan Stern

That so many binary or quasi-binary KBOs exist came as a real surprise to the research community.

Alan Stern