Quotes from Alan Stern

It's very hard to motivate yourself and others with only one goal - particularly if it's complex and you might not get there until years down the road. That's why intermediate goals are so important.

New Horizons isn't just visiting Pluto; it's visiting this entire region. Whatever it finds, this will be a signal moment for planetary exploration - the capstone to our first reconnaissance of the planets of our solar system.

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.

Either data supports the observations or they don't. Voting doesn't work in science.

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.

Pluto has strong atmospheric cycles: it snows on the surface; the snows sublimate and go back into the atmosphere each 248 year orbit.

I tell public audiences, don't go to a podiatrist for brain surgery; don't go to an astronomer for planetary science.

That so many binary or quasi-binary KBOs exist came as a real surprise to the research community.

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.

We were very surprised to find out that Pluto is still geologically alive. It has upended our ideas of how planetary geophysics works.

It shouldn't be so difficult to determine what a planet is. When you're watching a science fiction show like 'Star Trek' and they show up at some object in space and turn on the viewfinder, the audience and the people in the show know immediately whether it's a planet or a star or a comet or an asteroid.

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.

Why would you listen to an astronomer about a planet?

My field is called planetary science.

To say that what a planet is doesn't matter would be to imply that a planetary scientist couldn't explain to someone what the field is about.

I like the planets because they are real places that you can go to and send machines to. Faraway astronomy - galactic astronomy and extra-galactic astronomy - is really cool stuff, but to me, it's about destinations.

I think that one of the things that will come out of the New Horizons mission is that the public will take a look, and they won't know what else to call Pluto but a planet - and a pretty exciting one.

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.

I can't imagine how many kids around the world will look at pictures of Pluto and think, 'I want to grow up to be a scientist.'

Back before the Kuiper Belt was discovered, Pluto did look like a misfit that didn't belong with either the terrestrials or the giant planets.

Pluto has a very interesting history, and there is a lot of work that we need to do to understand this very complicated place.

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

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

I call Pluto the harbinger.