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...
arrive candy kids shop system
We're going to be like kids in a candy shop when we arrive at a system like this.
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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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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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Its surface is only 40 degrees above absolute zero, covered with exotic ice. We think it's going to be like kids in a candy store, arriving in a system like this.
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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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Two or three days doesn't mean a hill of beans.
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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.
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.
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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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I have July 14, 2015, emblazoned on my calendar. That's our arrival date at Pluto. We are now quite certain of that.
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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.