Going to the Kuiper Belt is like an ar.. Alan Stern

Going to the Kuiper Belt is like an archaeological dig into the history of the solar system.

Alan Stern

Profession: Engineer
Nationality: American

Some suggestions for you :

The Kuiper belt region, which I call the third zone because it lies beyond the rocky terrestrial planets and beyond the giant planets, is a bizarre frontier.

The New Horizons Pluto mission will be the first mission to a binary object and will help us understand everything from the origin of Earth's moon to the physics of mass transfer between binary stars.

CSF and its members believe strongly in the exploration of space of all kinds, including commercial purposes.

The solar system is completely wide open. Almost anywhere we go, I'm sure we would learn a lot.

The costs of badly-run NASA projects are paid for with cutbacks or delays in NASA projects that didn't go over budget. Hence the guilty are rewarded and the innocent are punished.

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.

The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.

Science doesn't work by voting. Did people vote on the theory of relativity? No! It's either right or it's wrong. Do we vote on whether genetics is a good theory or not? Of course not.

I actually started my career in planetary science with a master's thesis on Pluto.

Most of the oceans in the Solar System are deep beneath ice shelves.

As a scientist in charge of space sensors and entire space missions before I was at NASA, I myself was involved in projects that overran. But that's no excuse for remaining silent about this growing problem or failing to champion reform.

When I started working with NASA in 1989 as part of a mission to send spacecraft to Pluto, I knew it would take at least 10-15 years to see results of my efforts.

Every mission has life-or-death moments.

Discovering that our solar system has many more planets than we ever expected, and that most of them are ice dwarfs rather than like Earth and the other rocky terrestrials, is just another step in the revolution in viewpoint that removed the Earth from the center of the physical universe and makes Earth all the more special.

Show all