Alan Stern

Alan is best known as the principal investigator on New Horizons, the first-ever mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. He has made detailed studies of Neptune's largest moon, Triton. Every now and then his desire to learn something new brings him closer to home to study asteroids or the thin atmosphere of the Earth's Moon. He has been a guest observer on numerous NASA satellite observatories, including the International Ultraviolet Explorer, the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Infrared Observer and the Extreme Ultraviolet Observer. Dr. Stern has a long-term interest in aviation and was a finalist to fly on the Space Shuttle, he has been around hardware a lot, flown instruments for years. When the opportunity presented itself to go for the comet Hale Bopp, they needed a high altitude platform and we were able to show NASA that it was easier to turn the right astronomer into a backseater crewman than it was to turn a professional backseater into a guy who can do all the science. Faraway astronomy -- galactic astronomy and extra-galactic astronomy -- is really cool stuff, but it's about destinations. Alan picked the outer solar system because by the time He was in graduate school all the first explorations of Mars and Venus and Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus were already out of the way and there was no chance to get on board something really groundbreaking. With Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, it's wide open. We're in the space exploration business and the outer solar system is a wild, wooly place. We haven't explored it very well. Pluto and the Kuiper Belt have been just ranked by our once-every-ten-years decadal survey to be the highest priority for exploration in the solar system.