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.
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 Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.
I expect New Horizons will see more that Hubble cannot see.
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.
Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system.
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 basic story for Golden Spike is that we discovered a way to create do-it-yourself Apollo programs for other countries.
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.'
How can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun? There are dwarf stars, but they're still considered stars.
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 just think it's patently absurd for scientists to categorize objects on the basis of the numbers of objects that they can remember.
Liquids may have existed on the surface of Pluto in the past.
Pluto is the new Mars.
CASIS has to succeed because for it not to succeed would be a huge setback for the International Space Station program.
We really just didn't realize the diversity of planetary types in our solar system. Pluto looked like a misfit because it was the only one we saw. And just as a Chihuahua is still a dog, these ice dwarfs are still planetary bodies. They're large enough to make themselves round by self gravity, and they surely pass the test of planethood.
Pluto has a very interesting history, and there is a lot of work that we need to do to understand this very complicated place.
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.
If you put Earth out beyond Neptune, you wouldn't be able to call it a planet because it couldn't clear its zone.
Pluto has strong atmospheric cycles: it snows on the surface; the snows sublimate and go back into the atmosphere each 248 year orbit.
