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" A river is a river, independent of whether there are other rivers nearby. In science, we call things what they are based on their attributes, not what they're next to. "

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" 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. "

Alan Stern

Earth

Universe

Step

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

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

" 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. "

" We really just didn't realize the diversity of planetary types in our solar system. Pluto looked like a misfit because it was the only one we saw. And just as a Chihuahua is still a dog, these ice dwarfs are still planetary bodies. They're large enough to make themselves round by self gravity, and they surely pass the test of planethood. "

" We're in the space exploration business, and the outer solar system is a wild, wooly place. We haven't explored it very well. "

" During one of the Apollo missions, I saw Walter Cronkite showing off the flight plan. It just mesmerized me. All this detail! That's what I wanted. "

Alan Stern

Flight

Detail

" Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system. "

" The big lesson of planetary science is when you do a first reconnaissance of a new kind of object, you should expect the unexpected. "

" Pluto is as far across as Manhattan to Miami, but its atmosphere is bigger than the Earth's. "

" 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. "

" Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. "

Alan Stern

Absence

Evidence

" Typically in science, individual scientists make up their minds about scientific fact or theory one at a time. We don't take votes. We just don't vote on quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, why the sky is blue, or anything else. "

" Even in our deep ocean, there are ecosystems at work with no light whatsoever down in the deepest portions of the oceanic abyss. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In science, we take large numbers of disparate facts and reduce them to see patterns. We use the patterns to reduce the amount of information. It's the reason we name species and genera and families in biology. It's also the reason we have names for certain types of geological features and so on in other fields. "

" Having a diverse suite of U.S.-manned spaceflight systems to access space is inherently robust. "

" If you put Earth out beyond Neptune, you wouldn't be able to call it a planet because it couldn't clear its zone. "

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

Alan Stern

Than

Much

" No one predicted Mercury would be a planetary core with the mantle stripped off. No one predicted volcanoes on the Jovian moons, or oceans on the inside of them. I can tell you, for every single planet, huge 'we never guessed that' things. "

" Pluto is the new Mars. "

" 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. "

" 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. "