18 Eccentric Selected Quotes From Alan Stern

18 Eccentric Selected Quotes From Alan Sterne

I'm the one who originally coined the term 'dwarf planet,' back in the nineteen-nineties.

— 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

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

— 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

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.

— 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

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

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

— Alan Stern

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.

— Alan Stern

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

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

— Alan Stern

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

— Alan Stern

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.

— Alan Stern

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

— Alan Stern

We were very surprised to find out that Pluto is still geologically alive. It has upended our ideas of how planetary geophysics works.

— 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

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

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

— Alan Stern

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