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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The Kuiper Belt is the largest structure in the solar system. We used to think Pluto was a misfit.
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We're going to be like kids in a candy shop when we arrive at a system like this.
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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.
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The air conditioning was off. The flight controllers were sitting there wiping sweat.