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...
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The Kuiper Belt is the largest structure in the solar system. We used to think Pluto was a misfit.
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It used to be that Pluto was a misfit. Now it turns out that Earth is the misfit. Most planets in the solar system look like Pluto, and not like the terrestrial planets.
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It took us more years to get the mission beyond the Washington beltway than it will take to cross the entire Solar System.
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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.
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We're realizing just how much there is to the deep, outer solar system. I think it's exciting that textbooks have to be rewritten, over and over.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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It's ... strictly coincidental that Pluto of course was named for the god of the underworld and we're describing these Halloween moons.
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It's ... strictly coincidental that Pluto, of course, was named for the god of the underworld and we're describing these Halloween moons.
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This is in a very real sense the capstone of the initial reconnaissance of the planets that the United States has led for the world since the 1960s.
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I jokingly say now that New Horizons is the first mission to the nearest example of the last planet.
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In a real sense, this is not just a 4 billion-mile journey, but also a journey 4 billion years back in time.
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Not even Tombaugh and his mentors could have forecast how fascinating their new planet would turn out to be.