Alan Stern
Alan Stern
Sol Alan Sternis an American engineer and planetary scientist. He is the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Chief Scientist at Moon Express...
call everest mission planetary
I like to call this mission the Everest of planetary exploration. It's really fantastic.
calling discovery result scientific
I?m calling the discovery of the two new satellites the first scientific result of New Horizons.
days hill mean three
Two or three days doesn't mean a hill of beans.
ancient belt conducting dig era exploring history outer peek planetary pluto solar
Exploring Pluto and the Kuiper Belt is like conducting an archaeological dig into the history of the outer solar system, a place where we can peek into the ancient era of planetary formation.
advanced flying jupiter last launch ten window
The payload that we're flying is a much more advanced payload than we could have flown, for example, in the last Jupiter launch window ten years ago.
belt ice objects planet pluto solar type typical
We know of 17 objects that could be called planets, most of which are ice dwarfs. So Pluto is typical of what is probably the most populous type of planet in our solar system. It probably mimics other Kuiper Belt objects.
billion expect miles mission original takes visits
We really expect the mission to be transformational. This is the capstone of the original visits to the planets. It takes us 4 billion miles away and 4 billion years back in time.
belt bodies moon result
Our result suggests that other bodies in the Kuiper Belt may have more than one moon as well,
account belt bodies means modeling planetary pluto result scientists
Our result suggests other bodies in the Kuiper Belt may have more than one moon. It also means planetary scientists will have to take these new moons into account when modeling the formation of the Pluto system.
crude earth finally
Out Earth-based observations are still too crude to tell us much about what we'll see when we finally get there. We still don't know what we don't know about Pluto.
companions fact people pluto visceral
Just on a visceral level, the fact that Pluto has a whole suite of companions will make some people feel better.
four gas giants inner learned outer planets pluto rocky understand view
We've learned that the view of four inner rocky planets and four outer gas giants and one misfit Pluto is wrong. Now we understand Pluto's context.
backup days hill launching mean power three
I ... was not comfortable with launching without backup power. I've been working on this for 17 years ... Two or three days doesn't mean a hill of beans.
perseverance project represents
I will say that this has been our project mascot for a long time, this little ground-down pencil. And it represents perseverance to get this project under way, to get it built, to get it launched and now to get it to Pluto.