Alan Stern Quotes

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Alan Stern

Profession : Scientist

Birth : November 22, 1957

The big lesson of planetary science is when you do a first reconnaissance of a new kind of object, you should expect the unexpected.

Alan Stern

If the Pluto mission was a cat, then it would've been dead long ago because they only get nine lives, and we've had significantly more than nine stoppages and odd twists and turns.

Alan Stern

Most of the oceans in the Solar System are deep beneath ice shelves.

Alan Stern

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.

Alan Stern

In science, we take large numbers of disparate facts and reduce them to see patterns. We use the patterns to reduce the amount of information. It's the reason we name species and genera and families in biology. It's also the reason we have names for certain types of geological features and so on in other fields.

Alan Stern

To say that what a planet is doesn't matter would be to imply that a planetary scientist couldn't explain to someone what the field is about.

Alan Stern

I just think it's patently absurd for scientists to categorize objects on the basis of the numbers of objects that they can remember.

Alan Stern

The Kuiper belt region, which I call the third zone because it lies beyond the rocky terrestrial planets and beyond the giant planets, is a bizarre frontier.

Alan Stern

In the mind of the public, the word 'planet' carries a significance lacking in other words used to describe planetary bodies... many members of the public assume that alleged 'non-planets' cease to be interesting enough to warrant scientific exploration.

Alan Stern

Every mission has life-or-death moments.

Alan Stern

One of the implications of the discovery of the Kuiper Belt and its many small planets is that many scientists now think of the solar system as having not two but three zones.

Alan Stern

I've been on 26 space missions; they range from suborbital to orbital to shuttle experiments to planetary missions.

Alan Stern

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

Alan Stern

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.

Alan Stern

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.

Alan Stern