Top 104 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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

One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.

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

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.

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

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

A miniature poodle is not not a dog just because it's miniature.

Every mission has life-or-death moments.

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

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

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

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.

During one of the Apollo missions, I saw Walter Cronkite showing off the flight plan. It just mesmerized me. All this detail! That's what I wanted.

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.

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.

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

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

I think if you were between maybe 6 and 16, there was nothing like Apollo, and I wonder if there can be something like that again. We'll just have to see.

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

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

Science is really about individual experts reaching a consensus.

Of course Pluto is a planet: It's massive enough to have its shape controlled by gravity rather than material strength, which is the hallmark of planethood.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun? There are dwarf stars, but they're still considered stars.

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

I'm hopeful that commercial space exploration will takeoff. To really fuel the spaceflight revolution will require an investment of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and I think that's only going to happen in the commercial sector - if there are large profits to be made.

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.

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

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

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

Science doesn't work by voting. Did people vote on the theory of relativity? No! It's either right or it's wrong. Do we vote on whether genetics is a good theory or not? Of course not.

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.

We're in the space exploration business, and the outer solar system is a wild, wooly place. We haven't explored it very well.

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

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.

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

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Typically in science, individual scientists make up their minds about scientific fact or theory one at a time. We don't take votes. We just don't vote on quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, why the sky is blue, or anything else.

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

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.

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.

Pluto is the new Mars.

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

As a planetary scientist, I don't know what else to call Pluto: It's big and round and thousands of miles wide.

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.

There are lots of really interesting little planets out there in the Kuiper Belt, but Pluto's the only one that's got all the cool attributes.

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.

My field is called planetary science.

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.

Human beings have long wondered whether they are alone in the universe.

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.

The solar system is completely wide open. Almost anywhere we go, I'm sure we would learn a lot.

I call Pluto the harbinger.

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

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

It shouldn't be so difficult to determine what a planet is. When you're watching a science fiction show like 'Star Trek' and they show up at some object in space and turn on the viewfinder, the audience and the people in the show know immediately whether it's a planet or a star or a comet or an asteroid.