The big lesson of planetary science is when you do a first reconnaissance of a new kind of object, you should expect… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
Whether there's even an ocean on Pluto deep inside is a question I hope New Horizons can address in indirect ways. — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
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… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
I think when people see Pluto revealed by New Horizons, its satellite system, its complex surface, its atmosphere, I think they'll have… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
I think that one of the things that will come out of the New Horizons mission is that the public will take… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
There was a time when Pluto - which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led -… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
The New Horizons Pluto mission will be the first mission to a binary object and will help us understand everything from the… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
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… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
New Horizons isn't just visiting Pluto; it's visiting this entire region. Whatever it finds, this will be a signal moment for planetary… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
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… — Alan Stern Copy Share
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… — Alan Stern Copy Share
It used to be said that Pluto is a misfit. But now we know Earth is the misfit. This is the most populous class… — Alan Stern Copy Share
The Kuiper belt region, which I call the third zone because it lies beyond the rocky terrestrial planets and beyond the giant planets, is… — Alan Stern Copy Share
I think if you were between maybe 6 and 16, there was nothing like Apollo, and I wonder if there can be something like… — Alan Stern Copy Share
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 Copy Share
When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go down a… — Alan Stern Copy Share
Pluto is still active four and a half billion years into its history. It was expected that small planets like Pluto would cool off… — Alan Stern Copy Share
The Kuiper Belt is the largest mapped structure in our planetary system, three times as big as all the territory from the sun out… — Alan Stern Copy Share
If two billion people wanted to watch a robot fly by Pluto, imagine what it will be like when the first humans step on… — Alan Stern Copy Share
To keep everyone invested in your vision, you have to back up a little bit and really analyze who the different stakeholders are and… — Alan Stern Copy Share
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 Copy Share
One of the implications of the discovery of the Kuiper Belt and its many small planets is that many scientists now think of the… — Alan Stern Copy Share
CASIS has to succeed because for it not to succeed would be a huge setback for the International Space Station program. — Alan Stern Copy Share
