Chasing New Horizons Quotes

“There is a phrase from World War I describing warfare as “months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.” The same applies to long spacecraft missions. And it was a long and frankly terrifying hour as they awaited the hoped-for signal to return from New Horizons.”
― Alan Stern, Chasing New Horizons: Inside Humankind's First Mission to Pluto

“When word of the astronomers’ vote in Prague reached the New Horizons team, reactions ranged from indifferent (“Who cares what astronomers think? They’re not the experts in this.”), to bemused, to annoyed, to seriously pissed off. As Fran Bagenal succinctly put it, “Dwarf people are people. Dwarf planets are planets. End of argument.”
― Alan Stern, Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto

“THE SHEER COMPLEXITY OF PLUTO The diversity of phenomena seen on Pluto was far beyond what anyone, even New Horizons team members, expected to find on such a small planet so cold and far from the Sun. Ground fogs, high-altitude hazes, possible clouds, canyons, towering mountains, faults, polar caps, apparent dune fields, suspected ice volcanoes, glaciers, evidence for flowing (and even standing) liquids in the past, and more. This little red planet perched 3 billion miles away in the Kuiper Belt packed more punch than any other known small world explored, and indeed more punch than many much larger worlds. The variety of terrains, its complex interactions between the surface and the atmosphere, and the wide range of surface ages even prompted the New Horizons team to adopt the slogan “Pluto is the new Mars.”
― Alan Stern, Chasing New Horizons: Inside Humankind's First Mission to Pluto

“If we humans are nothing else, we are an inquisitive and restless species, explorers at heart. For that reason, we’re also optimistic that even humans will one day travel to the Kuiper Belt to explore it in person, making footfall on Pluto and other Kuiper Belt worlds, as we have already done on the Moon and will soon do on Mars, and then no doubt on many other worlds.”
― Alan Stern, Chasing New Horizons: Inside Humankind's First Mission to Pluto

“Twenty-six years had elapsed between that first fateful meeting to discuss the idea of going to Pluto with NASA in May of 1989, and that summer in 2015 when the exploration of Pluto was accomplished. People who were not even born when it started were moved by it in ways that no one had imagined when the quest began. History was made. New knowledge was created. A nation was reminded it can achieve greatness. And a world was reminded that we humans, we Earthlings—really can accomplish amazing things.”
― Alan Stern, Chasing New Horizons: Inside Humankind's First Mission to Pluto

“The ubiquity of New Horizons and Pluto on the web, and the number of people sharing in New Horizons events around the globe, gave this flyby an entirely new kind of feel. The world had changed since Voyager, with so many new forms of communication and participation. Thanks to that, the New Horizons mission felt in many ways like the first truly twenty-first-century planetary encounter. Consider: with Voyager, to participate fully you had to be in just the right place—specifically, at JPL—at just the right time—on flyby day. For New Horizons you didn’t need to be there; the flyby was everywhere simultaneously. The events at APL, the imagery from Pluto—everything that reached Earth—went onto the internet “for all mankind,” as it were.”
― Alan Stern, Chasing New Horizons: Inside Humankind's First Mission to Pluto

“Think about that for a minute: seventy years earlier, photons of light from the Sun had reflected off Pluto, traveled for four hours and over all those billions of miles to Earth, and passed through a telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona. Those photons created a tiny dot in a plate of photographic emulsion that had caught young Clyde Tombaugh’s eye when he examined that image a few weeks later, revealing the existence of a new, faraway planet. Now some atoms that had been part of Clyde were going to make the journey to that faraway world and then continue on, outward, to leave our solar system for interstellar space and the galaxy beyond. Whatever you believe about life, death, consciousness, and fate, this was surely a unique and wondrous memorial, unlike any other in history.”
― Alan Stern, Chasing New Horizons: Inside Humankind's First Mission to Pluto

“The people who created this amazing mission of exploration chased their new horizons hard; they never let go of their dream; they put everything they had into it; and eventually they chased it down and accomplished what they set out to do.”
― Alan Stern, Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto

“They had done it! Against all the struggles, doubts, and naysayers of the past 17 years, a spaceship had left Earth that day on its way to explore the Pluto system. With it rode the hopes of its team and a larger scientific community for what discoveries it would make there, a decade hence, in the cold, cold reaches of the outer solar system.”
― Alan Stern, Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto

“No doubt, there was something that drew people to this particular launch—a sense of something epochal, a passing of the torch from Voyager to a new generation of explorers who had been inspired by Voyager. You could feel it; it was in the air, now it was a new generation’s chance to explore never-before-seen worlds.”
― Alan Stern, Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto

“How does one power a spacecraft that will be traveling for at least a decade on a journey so far from the Sun that our star shines there at less than a thousandth of its brightness at Earth? Solar arrays won’t work that far from the Sun, and no battery is powerful and light enough to do the job of powering a decade-long mission. But the radioactive decay of plutonium (an element that was discovered in 1940 and was named for Pluto) passively generates heat without fail—and that heat can be turned into electricity. For this reason, plutonium-fueled nuclear batteries have been the power supplies of choice for deep-space interplanetary missions to the most distant planets from the Sun.”
― Alan Stern, Chasing New Horizons: Inside Humankind's First Mission to Pluto