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...”

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

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

“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 s...”

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

“It's interesting - Pluto's almost a brand unto itself. It's the farthest. It's the most diminutive of the classical planets. It's been maligned by astronomers. It's always the one with all t...”

“Pluto is still active four and a half billion years into its history. It was expected that small planets like Pluto would cool off long ago and not still be showing geological activity. Plut...”

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

“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 - poss...”

“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.”

“It's very hard to motivate yourself and others with only one goal - particularly if it's complex and you might not get there until years down the road. That's why intermediate goals are so i...”

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

“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 packa...”

“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 na...”

“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...”

“America's space program has been the envy and inspiration of the world. It has made landmark scientific discoveries that are a lasting legacy of this nation's greatness. It has studied Earth...”

“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 si...”

“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.”

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

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