Zitat des Tages von Alan Stern:
Most of the oceans in the Solar System are deep beneath ice shelves.
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.
We made more than just scientific discoveries... we rediscovered how much people love exploration.
Going to the Kuiper Belt is like an archaeological dig into the history of the solar system.
It is only by freeing NASA from routine human transport to low-Earth orbit that we can afford to once again see American astronauts exploring distant worlds.
By going to Pluto, we have a chance to anchor, with real data, models of the early evolution of Earth's atmosphere.
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.
Either data supports the observations or they don't. Voting doesn't work in science.
Are governments the only entities that can build human spacecraft? No - actually, every human spacecraft ever built for NASA was built by private industry.
I tell public audiences, don't go to a podiatrist for brain surgery; don't go to an astronomer for planetary science.
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.'
A miniature poodle is not not a dog just because it's miniature.
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.
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.
Why would you listen to an astronomer about a planet?
The Kuiper Belt is the largest mapped structure in our planetary system, three times as big as all the territory from the sun out to Neptune's orbit.
Having a diverse suite of U.S.-manned spaceflight systems to access space is inherently robust.
The basic story for Golden Spike is that we discovered a way to create do-it-yourself Apollo programs for other countries.
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.
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.
If you go to planetary science meetings and hear technical talks on Pluto, you will hear experts calling it a planet every day.
You could not have predicted the amazing discoveries at Pluto, even though we have been to a couple of objects in the solar system that were at least a little analogous to Pluto.
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.
I'm hopeful that commercial space exploration will takeoff. To really fuel the spaceflight revolution will require an investment of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and I think that's only going to happen in the commercial sector - if there are large profits to be made.
Liquids may have existed on the surface of Pluto in the past.
The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.
I expect New Horizons will see more that Hubble cannot see.
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.
Whether there's even an ocean on Pluto deep inside is a question I hope New Horizons can address in indirect ways.
Pluto is still active four and a half billion years into its history. It was expected that small planets like Pluto would cool off long ago and not still be showing geological activity. Pluto is, in fact, showing numerous examples of geological activity on a massive scale across the planet.
America's space program has been the envy and inspiration of the world. It has made landmark scientific discoveries that are a lasting legacy of this nation's greatness. It has studied Earth in ways no other nation can match.
I think if you were between maybe 6 and 16, there was nothing like Apollo, and I wonder if there can be something like that again. We'll just have to see.
I just think it's patently absurd for scientists to categorize objects on the basis of the numbers of objects that they can remember.
Human beings have long wondered whether they are alone in the universe.
CSF and its members believe strongly in the exploration of space of all kinds, including commercial purposes.
I tend to think of Pluto and its moons as presents sitting under a Christmas tree. They're wrapped, and from Earth all we can do is look at the boxes to see whether they're light or heavy, to see if something maybe jiggles a bit inside. We're seeing intriguing things, but we really don't know what's in there.