Words matter. These are the best Pluto Quotes from famous people such as Alan Stern, Danica McKellar, Burt Rutan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, David Grinspoon, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.
Pluto has strong atmospheric cycles: it snows on the surface; the snows sublimate and go back into the atmosphere each 248 year orbit.
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.
With any luck, by the time NASA’s space probe hits Pluto, you’ll be booking a spaceflight with a privately run suborbital airline.
Pluto’s orbit is so elongated that it crosses the orbit of another planet. Now that’s… you’ve got no business doing that if you want to call yourself a planet. Come on, now! There’s something especially transgressive about that.
If two billion people wanted to watch a robot fly by Pluto, imagine what it will be like when the first humans step on Mars. It’ll be the most unifying event anybody could ever put on.
If the Pluto mission was a cat, then it would’ve been dead long ago because they only get nine lives, and we’ve had significantly more than nine stoppages and odd twists and turns.
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.
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.
We were very surprised to find out that Pluto is still geologically alive. It has upended our ideas of how planetary geophysics works.
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.
Pluto and its brethren are the most populous class of planets in our solar system.
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.
There are lots of really interesting little planets out there in the Kuiper Belt, but Pluto’s the only one that’s got all the cool attributes.
I call Pluto the harbinger.
Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system.
We’re pretty sure there’s plenty of organic material on Pluto. The atmosphere is largely methane, and in sunlight, methane builds organic molecules. We see reddish stuff on the surface that we think is organic material.
It’s interesting – Pluto’s almost a brand unto itself. It’s the farthest. It’s the most diminutive of the classical planets. It’s been maligned by astronomers. It’s always the one with all the question marks in the back of the textbook in the table. I think children identify with it because it’s smaller, kind of cute.
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.
When I started working with NASA in 1989 as part of a mission to send spacecraft to Pluto, I knew it would take at least 10-15 years to see results of my efforts.
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.
When I was a kid, I went from ground zero to Pluto. The first place I played was the Houston Astrodome.
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 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!
The bottom line is that finding orphan planets – small, faint, and located who-knows-where – is not for the faint of heart. The task is comparable to observing a match flame at the distance of Pluto. The WISE satellite, a hi-tech, space-based infrared telescope especially suited for such work, has found only a few.
There was a time when Pluto – which NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led – was considered the last planet. We now know there are thousands of other – possibly inhabited – planets.
I refuse to accept Pluto’s resignation as a planet.
Pluto is the new Mars.
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.
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.
