Ellen Stofan Quotes
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Everybody has busy lives, but you can tell people, 'Go outside and look at the night sky. We've been able to demonstrate that every star you see probably has a planet around it.'
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One of the big things about space exploration is that it is as expensive as it is complicated, and you need all the countries of the world to help if you want to accomplish big goals.
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What we expect to find, certainly in our own solar system, are probably simple single or multiple-cell forms of life. To get to intelligent life takes stability of conditions over huge, long periods of time.
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I grew up in this business... A lot of my life has been centered around this question about how NASA is helping us to understand our own home planet... and to understand our place in the universe.
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I live an hour from NASA's HQ in Washington, D.C., and sitting in a jam stresses me out.
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We're not going to get humans to Mars until at least the mid-2030s, and the world is going to change by then.
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We actually look to the scientific community to kind of come back to NASA and tell us what the priorities should be. And then at NASA, we try to look within our budget and say, 'What can we accommodate, and what are the most important things for the nation?'
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Communication is an issue where we can improve, and if I can do anything to help, I am happy to.
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When we go to explore, we do it as a globe.
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Prior to Magellan, due to the fact that we knew it was so hot on Venus, we thought that the rocks at the surface would behave more plastically, more like Silly Putty than like solid rock in the way that we think of it, like the rocks that I'm sitting on.
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A lot of my role is advocacy, and as a scientist, you're an advocate, too, because you are coming up with a theory and having to convince your fellow scientists that you're right.
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The public has an incredible capacity for appreciating the wonder of our planet, our solar system, our universe.
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We want to make sure we get living astronauts to the surface of Mars.
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Mars missions will require up to three years in reduced gravity, so we need to make sure astronauts can not only survive but thrive as they move outward to explore this new world.
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When you look at Venus and the Earth, they formed at about the same place in the solar system. They're made of about the same materials; they're about the same size.
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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.
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'The Martian' may be fiction, but at NASA, we are working to make it a reality.
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Every time I give a talk, I ask the audience - especially if it's kids - how many want to go to Mars. At least half raise their hands. I don't think there's going to be any shortage of volunteers.
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If you think of the Apollo capsule coming into Earth with a parachute, the Mars atmosphere is just so thin, you've got to find some way of slowing yourself down really rapidly.