Heidi Hammel Quotes
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We've explored every type of environment in the solar system at least once.
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The Hubble Telescope can see the farthest galaxies. The Webb Telescope will see the farthest stars.
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When Hubble was launched, it became clear very shortly thereafter that there was a problem with the optics.The mirror was not quite the right shape. And the one program that I had really been looking forward to doing with Hubble was studying outer planets in our solar system, the planets Uranus and Neptune.
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We really have only been observing Neptune with big telescopes since shortly before 1989.
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No one planet can tell us everything about the universe, but Neptune seems to hold more than its share of information about the formation of our own solar system - as well as the solar systems beyond.
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Even after years of observing, a new picture of Uranus from Keck Observatory can stop me in my tracks and make me say, 'Wow!'
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I think all scientists are like detectives. We are most happy when we find something that doesn't fit our expectations.
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When I first heard that a comet was going to hit Jupiter, my reaction was, 'Eh. So what? Jupiter's huge. Comets are small. And so when I saw the first impact site and it was huge and dark, I was flabbergasted.
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The Hubble program has been so fantastically successful. It's more than what anyone expected.
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Webb will return extremely interesting measurements of chemistry in the Martian atmosphere. And most importantly, these Mars data will be immediately available to the planetary community to enable them to plan even more detailed Mars observations with Webb in future cycles.
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Together, NASA and Hubble are opening new vistas on the universe.
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I think the only way that the U.S. human spaceflight program is going to get really revitalized, really put sort of an Apollo level push on it, is if some other country, perhaps China, were to actually have a landed flight to the moon and brought back our American flag and put it in Tiananmen Square.
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If there were creatures on Uranus - and I don't think there are - seasonal affective disorder would be a lifetime thing.
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Every observation that we make, every mission that we send to various places in the solar system is just taking us one step further to finding that truly habitable environment, a water-rich environment.
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It's clear that the only thing that is inhibiting us from doing further human exploration of space is money and the will to do it.
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I would say the biggest challenge I had as a woman in science is be a mom. It's really hard. It's very hard work having children, and I tell kids this all the time.
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I feel like an old-fashioned mountain climber when I am making discoveries, seeing something for the first time, realizing that no human before me has ever seen what I am seeing. It takes your breath away - for just a moment, you feel a pause in time, as you know you are crossing a boundary into a new realm of knowledge.
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Having the young people engaged, involved, and being the leaders themselves is a great way to capture them intellectually and emotionally.
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Neptune's unusual behavior is showing us that though we can make great models of planetary atmospheric circulation, there may be key pieces missing.
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When I was in college, I didn't like physics a lot, and I really wasn't very good at physics. And there were a lot of people around me who were really good at physics: I mean, scary good at physics. And they weren't much help to me, because I would say, 'How do you do this?' They'd say, 'Well, the answer's obvious.'
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Having high quality daycare is by far the most important thing you can do when your kids are little. When I relocated, I spent more time looking for daycare than I did looking for a house.
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Because exploration is not science driven, you've got to ask what is it driven by? And it's driven by politics.
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The thing about telescopes is that the mirror is the main component. Once that's built, you don't need to build new ones; you just need to swap out the instruments. There's nothing wrong with Hubble's mirror.
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What I want to look at with Webb is what we call ice giants in our solar system - the planets Neptune and Uranus.