Alan Stern

We're going to find Marses and maybe Earths out in the solar system's attic of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt. ”

The solar system is completely wide open. Almost anywhere we go, I'm sure we would learn a lot. ”

Pluto and its brethren are the most populous class of planets in our solar system. ”

The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected. ”

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. ”

Most of the oceans in the Solar System are deep beneath ice shelves. ”

It says something very deep about humans and our society, something very good about us, that we've invested our time and treasure in building a machine that can fly across three billion miles of space to explore the Pluto system. ”

Going to the Kuiper Belt is like an archaeological dig into the history of the solar system. ”

I think when people see Pluto revealed by New Horizons, its satellite system, its complex surface, its atmosphere, I think they'll have a hard time saying 'That's not a planet' because it obviously will be, and I think most people are already coming to that opinion anyway, but I think that's really going to drive it home viscerally. ”

Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system. ”