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...
air flight sitting
The air conditioning was off. The flight controllers were sitting there wiping sweat.
arrive candy kids shop system
We're going to be like kids in a candy shop when we arrive at a system like this.
close high inner map planets regions resolution sensitive sky sun though wide
Even though it's not as sensitive or as high resolution as the Hubble, we're able to look at the inner planets close to the sun and map wide regions of the sky very quickly.
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.
thank
We thank them for being here with us.
attention divide four instead ways
We'll have to divide our attention four ways instead of two,
believe classify objects planetary properties
I don't believe we should classify planetary objects by location. We should use properties of the objects as a guide.
brightest fossil objects pluto relic solar
Pluto is just the brightest of the many objects in the Kuiper Belt. It's a fossil relic of the formation of our solar system.
arrival certain date july quite
I have July 14, 2015, emblazoned on my calendar. That's our arrival date at Pluto. We are now quite certain of that.
ashes pluto
Some of Clyde's ashes are on their way to Pluto today.
collapse happen matter models
Some models say the collapse can be very sudden. It can happen in a matter of months.
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.
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.