Quotes About Exploration

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

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.

We're going to understand that there is life on other bodies in the solar system.

We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there.

I've always been fascinated with science and exploring our world, from microbes to the solar system.

I used to be a strong believer that we would eventually colonize the solar system the way it's been done in science fiction many, many times: bases on the moon, Mars colonized, move out to the outer planets, then we go to the next solar system and build a colony there. I don't know now - I'm not as convinced that's the way it's going to pan out.

What I want to look at with Webb is what we call ice giants in our solar system - the planets Neptune and Uranus.

I think Pluto has to be considered among the places in the solar system that are possible homes for life.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with different planets in the solar system, and I used to create, for every single planet, a different alien race with a certain kind of pet, a certain kind of house, a certain kind of water system, and everything. I would draw these pictures. I had hundreds of these pictures in a box.

I wanted to be a snowplow driver when I was a kid. Growing up in the Rocky Mountains, that's the most glorious job you can imagine. But then my mother took me to a lecture about the solar system when I was 8, and I got hooked.

I've been thinking a lot about space. It was one of those slow-motion realisations how little we are, how far we are from everything else in our solar system. This idea of distance started kind of haunting me. How do you go forth and accomplish things but not end up leaving everything you started out with in the dust?

There are lots of ideas which extend the Copernican principle one step further. We went from the solar system to the galaxy to zillions of galaxies and now to realising even that isn't all there is.

Water-based life is very much an Earth-centric view, and we can push the envelope on that here in our own solar system. We have the methane seas of Titan.

I'd love to go into space again if there were a mission to Mars. I'd also love to go to a completely different planetary system, out of our solar system.

We go to learn about our solar system, to search for life, and to understand what happened to Mars so we avoid it ourselves.

Because Alpha Centauri is so close, it is our first stop outside our solar system. There's almost certain to be small, rocky planets around Alpha Centauri A and B.

Before 1995, the only planets we knew about were the planets in our solar system.

We've explored every type of environment in the solar system at least once.

The geysering on Enceladus is the most astonishing phenomenon we have in our solar system.

Small bodies in our solar system, like comets and asteroids, help us understand how the solar system formed and provide opportunities to advance exploration.

Mars, the second planet from the sun in our solar system is touted to be the next home for human race in the coming decades if the research and understanding of the planet is cracked by the bigwigs of the science world.

When we get out to other planets in the solar system, we'll use the gravitational pull of each planet to help launch us to the next.

As far as I'm concerned, Enceladus has become the go-to place in our solar system for issues bearing on extraterrestrial life. It's a great place to examine extraterrestrial organic chemistry that is water-based and, therefore, like biotic chemistry on Earth.

I know that I derive the same kind of spiritual fulfillment from what I do, being a planetary scientist, seeing our exploration of the solar system come to fruition. I get such a spiritual high from it that I don't even see the need for religion.