American - Scientist | November 22, 1957 -
The big lesson of planetary science is when you do a first reconnaissance of a new kind of object, you should expect the unexpected.
Alan Stern
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To keep everyone invested in your vision, you have to back up a little bit and really analyze who the different stakeholders are and what they individually respond to.
VisionYouBackBack UpUpRespond
Just because Pluto or comets aren't as big as Jupiter doesn't mean they are not scientifically important - indeed, just the reverse is often true. Sometimes, great things come in small packages.
GreatSmallGreat ThingsSometimes
At the time of Apollo 11, I was a grade-schooler, and I remember every time an Apollo mission would take place that, like a lot of little boys, I'd gather in front of the TV for hours and hours and hours with my little brother.
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Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system.
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A miniature poodle is not not a dog just because it's miniature.
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One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.
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The first mission to Mars did not expect to find craters and river valleys, and yet they did. The first mission to Jupiter didn't expect to find ocean worlds and volcano worlds, but they did.
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When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go down a long list of how often I've been surprised by the richness of nature.
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Pluto has strong atmospheric cycles: it snows on the surface; the snows sublimate and go back into the atmosphere each 248 year orbit.
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If you put Earth out beyond Neptune, you wouldn't be able to call it a planet because it couldn't clear its zone.
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Either data supports the observations or they don't. Voting doesn't work in science.
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