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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. "

Related Quotes:

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

Alan Stern

Diversity

System

Solar

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Pluto is the new Mars. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. "

Alan Stern

Absence

Evidence

" Of course Pluto is a planet: It's massive enough to have its shape controlled by gravity rather than material strength, which is the hallmark of planethood. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

Alan Stern

Than

Much

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

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

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "