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We live inside the atmosphere of an active star.
Heidi Hammel -
I went to MIT. I do rocket science. Being a mom is much harder.
Heidi Hammel
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One of the things I've learned that has made me very successful, I think, as a scientist in general, sometimes you just have to take a chance.
Heidi Hammel -
People have this idea that if you're not brilliant like Einstein, you can't be a scientist. And that's just a myth. He was the one out of a million scientists, but there were 999,999 other scientists who were not as brilliant but who just do great science, as well.
Heidi Hammel -
There should be a water table on Mars.
Heidi Hammel -
Hubble is absolutely unique; we must have a telescope in space to complement the very large telescopes on the ground.
Heidi Hammel -
As you go further from the sun, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus are each colder in their upper atmosphere. But when you get to Neptune, it's just as warm as Uranus.
Heidi Hammel -
The whole Hubble program has just been a fabulous testament to the NASA science community and the NASA astronaut community.
Heidi Hammel
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I think religion and science operate in different regimes. Religion is a belief system that tries to give meaning and comprehension to peoples' lives. Science is more about the mechanics of the universe around us and the way in which it works. And I don't think those things have to be mutually exclusive.
Heidi Hammel -
Climates always change. The question is, how are we going to adapt to climate change? Now, it may be true that we are accelerating it inadvertently by messing with our atmosphere, but regardless of that, the climate will change.
Heidi Hammel -
C is a passing grade. You don't need straight A's to be a scientist, despite what you may have heard.
Heidi Hammel -
Hubble orbits high, outside Earth's atmosphere so it can see a wide spectrum of light our atmosphere blocks.
Heidi Hammel -
Hubble wasn't designed to look at objects in our solar system, but after it was launched, astronomers realized that with just a little bit of modification to the software, it could look at solar system objects.
Heidi Hammel -
Most people have already seen a cosmic collision. If you've seen a shooting star ever, you've seen a cosmic collision, because a shooting star is not a star. It's a tiny dust or pea sized fragment of an asteroid or a comet hitting our atmosphere and burning up as it hits in, as it comes in.
Heidi Hammel
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The Hubble images far surpassed anything taken by any telescope on Earth.
Heidi Hammel -
What we're learning is that the sun and its warmth isn't the only way to get warmth in the solar system, and we've been thinking that for some time.
Heidi Hammel -
Hubble made my career.
Heidi Hammel -
Planetary missions are great, but they're usually only brief snapshots of those planets and also really very close-up.
Heidi Hammel -
There are amateurs who have seen that one of Uranus' poles is brighter than the other, or who have seen cloud formations on the planet. For all we know, interesting things are happening there all the time.
Heidi Hammel -
I have a little piece of Hubble that someone brought back from one of the repair missions. It's on my desk, where I work. I do feel a personal connection to it. It's been part of my life for 20 years.
Heidi Hammel
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I'm happy here on the surface of the earth. If space travel ever got to be as simple as jet travel today, yeah, I'd take a jet flight to the moon.
Heidi Hammel -
Weather forecast for Jupiter's South Equatorial Belt: cloudy with a chance of ammonia.
Heidi Hammel -
We don't use Hubble to stare at Jupiter unless there's a special event or some special reason.
Heidi Hammel -
Because Hubble's been up so many years now, it's actually given us a window to things like... how planets' atmospheres actually change, evolve... over time.
Heidi Hammel