Zitat des Tages über Pluto:
Once solved, the severe handicaps imposed on space exploration by the weight and chemical limitations of rockets would no longer apply. The whole timetable of our conquest of the planets in our solar system would be tremendously speeded up, from hot Mercury all the way out to frigid Pluto.
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.
When I was a little kid, we only knew about our nine planets. Since then, we've downgraded Pluto but have discovered that other solar systems and stars are common. So life is probably quite prevalent.
All Plutophiles are based in America. If you go to other countries, they have much less of an attachment to either the existence or preservation of Pluto as a planet.
By going to Pluto, we have a chance to anchor, with real data, models of the early evolution of Earth's atmosphere.
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.'
When I was little, we had a Golden Book that had all these Disney characters in one portrait on the first page. My dad used to read from it every night. We'd play this game of find Pluto or find Donald Duck. He'd read us stories and do all the voices. Those are great memories.
Many people don't give a rip about politics and know as much about public affairs as they know about the topography of Pluto.
I've always liked Saturn. But I also have some sympathy for Pluto because I heard it's been downgraded from a planet, and I think it should remain a planet. Once you've given something planetary status it's kind of mean to take it away.
The cosmic game changed forever in 1992. Before then, logic told us that there had to be other planets besides the nine (if you still count poor Pluto) in our solar system, but until that year, when two astronomers detected faint, telltale radio signals in the constellation Virgo, we had no hard evidence of their existence.
I think that the first men to land on Pluto are going to make some very astonishing discoveries. But I am also sure that they will never go there in rockets. They will have to make the immense trip by some more powerful means - like the anti-gravitational drive.
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.
Liquids may have existed on the surface of Pluto in the past.
The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.
When I was a kid, I went from ground zero to Pluto. The first place I played was the Houston Astrodome.
If you slid Pluto to where Earth is right now, heat from the sun would evaporate that ice, and it would grow a tail. Now that's no kind of behavior for a planet.
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.
I gotta say, Pluto is such a great character, and if I ever got to work with him, I'd be very happy. The scene where he gets caught in fly paper, he's such a great dog!
Jupiter, Pluto, pick a planet: we can go there. I just got a bit more work to do in the music industry, and we're going to space, baby.
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.
Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system.
