American - Scientist | November 22, 1957 -
Just because Pluto orbits with many other dwarf planets doesn't change what it is, just as whether an object is a mountain or not doesn't depend on whether it's in a group or in isolation.
Alan Stern
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There was a time when Pluto - which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led - was considered the last planet. We now know there are thousands of other - possibly inhabited - planets.
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Human beings have long wondered whether they are alone in the universe.
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People know a planet when they see one, and I think that's a pretty darn good test, in fact, for planethood.
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I just think it's patently absurd for scientists to categorize objects on the basis of the numbers of objects that they can remember.
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I think when people see Pluto revealed by New Horizons, its satellite system, its complex surface, its atmosphere, I think they'll have a hard time saying 'That's not a planet' because it obviously will be, and I think most people are already coming to that opinion anyway, but I think that's really going to drive it home viscerally.
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As a planetary scientist, I don't know what else to call Pluto: It's big and round and thousands of miles wide.
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How can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun? There are dwarf stars, but they're still considered stars.
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Going to the Kuiper Belt is like an archaeological dig into the history of the solar system.
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It says something very deep about humans and our society, something very good about us, that we've invested our time and treasure in building a machine that can fly across three billion miles of space to explore the Pluto system.
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Every mission has life-or-death moments.
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I've been on 26 space missions; they range from suborbital to orbital to shuttle experiments to planetary missions.
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