I was effectively unemployed after my son was born. I resigned from Bristol because I wasn’t happy with the way my career was going then discovered I was pregnant when I was out of a job, but I was freelancing.

At Bristol I found it quite difficult to continue trying to balance three things - teaching, research and public engagement, for which television was obviously the most prominent part.

Did people’s attitudes towards me change after I appeared on TV? Yeah, definitely. During my career I’ve had some flak - particularly doing television.

I’ve wanted to write a book on embryology, that extraordinary journey where you start off as a single cell and end up with a human body, for a general audience for years.

But I think you can strip the emotion and the subjectivity away while you focus on doing the science - and that’s really important.

The scientific method is about trying to remove our own bias and subjectivity, and be as objective as possible. But then you can put it back into context and you’re allowed to be emotional and human about the way you engage with it.

We have plenty of young women coming into biology and medicine, but we don’t have enough coming into physics and engineering. It’s a really weird thing because, of course, all these subjects are completely neutral.

You’re not tapping into the widest possible pool of talent if you’re shutting some people out of particular careers.

If two billion people wanted to watch a robot fly by Pluto, imagine what it will be like when the first humans step on Mars. It'll be the most unifying event anybody could ever put on.

We made more than just scientific discoveries... we rediscovered how much people love exploration.

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 were very surprised to find out that Pluto is still geologically alive. It has upended our ideas of how planetary geophysics works.

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.

People ask, 'What are the scientific questions you're going to answer?' New Horizons doesn't have any of those; it's purely about raw exploration... We're not 'rewriting the textbook' - we're writing the textbook from scratch.

Pluto has strong atmospheric cycles: it snows on the surface; the snows sublimate and go back into the atmosphere each 248 year orbit.

Pluto has a very interesting history, and there is a lot of work that we need to do to understand this very complicated place.

I expect New Horizons will see more that Hubble cannot see.

Pluto is the new Mars.

CSF and its members believe strongly in the exploration of space of all kinds, including commercial purposes.

CASIS has to succeed because for it not to succeed would be a huge setback for the International Space Station program.

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

That so many binary or quasi-binary KBOs exist came as a real surprise to the research community.

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

I'm the one who originally coined the term 'dwarf planet,' back in the nineteen-nineties.