Alan Stern

Sol Alan Stern (born November 22, 1957) is an American engineer, planetary scientist and space tourist.

He is the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Chief Scientist at Moon Express.

Stern has been involved in 24 suborbital, orbital, and planetary space missions, including eight for which he was the mission principal investigator.

He graduated from St. Mark's School of Texas in 1975.

He then attended the University of Texas, Austin, where he received his bachelor's degrees in physics & astronomy and his master's degrees in aerospace engineering and planetary atmospheres.

He earned a doctorate in astrophysics and planetary science from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

From 1983 to 1991, Stern held positions at the University of Colorado in the Center for Space and Geoscience Policy, the office of the vice president for Research, and the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy.

He received his doctorate in 1989.

"I recall going to JPL, the Jet Propulsion Lab, the summer of 1989 when I was in graduate school to take a summer course in planetary exploration at Caltech and this was the summer of the Voyager fly-by of Neptune and Triton (which has turned out to be rather a twin of Pluto). It was amazing to get to be a part of some first-time exploration like that! Within a matter of months, a small group of us had formed a team, an advocacy group, Why don't we get a mission together for Pluto?"

After completing a master's degree in aerospace engineering Stern spent seven years as an aerospace systems engineer, concentrating on spacecraft and payload systems at the NASA Johnson Space Center, Martin Marietta Aerospace, and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado.

Stern is currently active as a consultant for private sector space efforts and has stated:

"I am a fan of public-private partnerships and building bridges to new markets, I believe we are on the verge of a whole new era of space exploration and that the private sector can provide reliable cost effective services that can increase the value and leverage government space budgets."

From 1991 to 1994 he was the leader of Southwest Research Institute's Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences group and was chair of NASA's Outer Planets Science Working Group.

From 1994 to 1998 he was the leader of the Geophysical, Astrophysical, and Planetary Science section in Southwest Research Institute's Space Sciences Department, and from 1998 to 2005 he was the director of the Department of Space Studies at Southwest Research Institute.

In 1995 he was selected to be a Space Shuttle mission specialist finalist, and in 1996 he was a candidate Space Shuttle payload specialist but did not have the opportunity to fly on the Space Shuttle.

One of his projects was the Southwest Ultraviolet Imaging System, an instrument which flew on two space shuttle missions, STS-85 in 1997 and STS-93 in 1999.

Stern has also developed eight scientific instruments for planetary and near-space research missions and 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.

Stern was executive director of the Southwest Research Institute's Space Science and Engineering Division until becoming Associate Administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in 2007.

He resigned from that position after nearly a year.

His research has focused on studies of our solar system's Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, comets, the satellites of the outer planets, Pluto, and the search for evidence of planetary systems around other stars.

He has also worked on spacecraft rendezvous theory, terrestrial polar mesospheric clouds, galactic astrophysics, and studies of tenuous satellite atmospheres, including the atmosphere of the Moon.

Stern was born in New Orleans, Louisiana to Jewish parents Joel and Leonard Stern.

In 2007, Stern was listed among Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World.

On June 14, 2007, in an address to the Smithsonian Institution for their "Exploring the Solar System Lecture Series", Stern commented on the New Horizons mission:

On August 27, 2008, Stern was elected to the board of directors of the Challenger Center for Space Science Education.

On June 18, 2008, Stern joined Odyssey Moon Limited (Isle of Man), a private industry effort, as a part-time Science Mission Director/consultant in their efforts to launch a robotic mission to the Earth's Moon by participating in the $30 Million Google Lunar X-Prize competition.

In December 2008, Stern joined Blue Origin, a company that was founded by Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos as an independent representative for research and education Missions.

The company has stated that its objective is to develop a new vertical-take-off, vertical-landing vehicle known as New Shepard that is designed to take a small number of astronauts on a sub-orbital journey into space and reduce the cost of space transportation.

The company is located in Kent, Washington and has flight tested some hardware.

He was a member of the New Millennium Deep Space 1 (DS1) mission science team, and is a Co-investigator on both the ESA SPICAM Mars UV spectrometer launched on Mars Express, and the Hubble Space Telescope Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) installed in 2009.

He is the PI of the SWUIS ultraviolet imager, which has flown two Shuttle missions, and the SWUIS-A airborne astronomical facility.

In this capacity, Stern has flown numerous WB-57 and F-18 airborne research astronomy missions.

Stern and his colleague, Dr. Daniel Durda, have been flying on the modified F/A-18 Hornet with a sophisticated camera system called the Southwest Ultraviolet Imaging System (SWUIS).

In 2012, Stern co-founded Uwingu.

Stern has experience in instrument development, concentrating on ultraviolet technologies.

Stern is a principal investigator (PI) in NASA's UV sounding rocket program, and was the project scientist on a Shuttle-deployable SPARTAN astronomical satellite.

He was the PI of the advanced, miniaturized HIPPS Pluto breadboard camera/IR spectrometer/UV spectrometer payload for the NASA/Pluto-Kuiper Express mission, and he is the PI of the PERSI imager/spectrometer payload on NASA's New Horizons Pluto mission.

Stern is also the PI of the ALI CE UV Spectrometer for the ESA/NASA Rosetta comet orbiter.

In 2015, Stern was the recipient of Smithsonian Magazine's American Ingenuity Award in the Physical Sciences category.

On October 7, 2016, Stern was inducted into the Colorado Space Hall of Fame.