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...
fastest months moon nine pass spacecraft
It'll be the fastest spacecraft ever to Jupiter13 months after launch. We pass the Moon in just nine hours.
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Whether or not an object has a moon is not part of the criteria that we've considered, because so many small objects in the solar system have moons,
moon nine months
It'll be the fastest spacecraft ever to Jupiter...13 months after launch. We pass the Moon in just nine hours.
halloween moon pluto
It's strictly coincidental that Pluto of course was named for the god of the underworld and we're describing these Halloween moons
real moon horizon
This is in a real sense the capstone of the initial missions to explore the planets. Pluto, its moons and this part of the solar system are such mysteries that New Horizons will rewrite all of the textbooks.
belt bodies moon result
Our result suggests that other bodies in the Kuiper Belt may have more than one moon as well,
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We're going to be like kids in a candy shop when we arrive at a system like this.
history initial states united
The United States is going to go down in history for the initial reconnaissance of the planets.
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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.
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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.
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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.
air flight sitting
The air conditioning was off. The flight controllers were sitting there wiping sweat.
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.
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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.