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.
Heidi Hammel
Even after years of observing, a new picture of Uranus from Keck Observatory can stop me in my tracks and make me say, 'Wow!'
By monitoring auroral activity on exoplanets, we may be able to infer the presence of water on or within an exoplanet.
If I see something that seems out of sync with what's already known, the first thing I do is try to find out what's wrong with the data. Once you've done that, and it still seems wrong, that's when things get interesting. It means you've found something new to understand.
Ultimately, life is a chemical interaction.
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.
I don't think I could advocate for increasing NASA's budget by a factor of two or ten, because I want us to have good roads in our country. I want us to have good education in our country. And NASA's budget is part of a discretionary budget, and we can't make that bigger without taking away other things.
The Hubble Telescope can see the farthest galaxies. The Webb Telescope will see the farthest stars.
Planetary missions are great, but they're usually only brief snapshots of those planets and also really very close-up.
There's this myth that science is hard. But everything is hard.
Technological prescience in science fiction usually requires an author with luck. Societal prescience requires a poet.
Whatever I was going into, whether it was going to be chorus or history or astronomy or whatever, do it right. Be a professional. Don't just do a half baked job. Do everything correctly. Get down. Learn the details of what you're going to do.
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.
Hubble is absolutely unique; we must have a telescope in space to complement the very large telescopes on the ground.
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.
The Hubble images far surpassed anything taken by any telescope on Earth.
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.
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.
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.
Amid apocalyptic dystopia, 'Fahrenheit 451''s protagonist retains sparks of curiosity, creativity, and courage, and these human characteristics are the seeds of hope that can arise, phoenix-like, from civilization's ashes.
We live inside the atmosphere of an active star.
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.'
What I want to look at with Webb is what we call ice giants in our solar system - the planets Neptune and Uranus.
Neptune's unusual behavior is showing us that though we can make great models of planetary atmospheric circulation, there may be key pieces missing.
C is a passing grade. You don't need straight A's to be a scientist, despite what you may have heard.
Hubble made my career.
Together, NASA and Hubble are opening new vistas on the universe.
We don't use Hubble to stare at Jupiter unless there's a special event or some special reason.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Scientists normally like to do experiments. You know, they like to mix this with that and see what happens. They like to take this thing and poke it and see how it reacts. In astronomy, we can't do that. The stars, the planets, the galaxies, are so far away that we just look at them, and we have to learn things by looking at them.
We need people pushing the boundaries. Exploration is what we, as humans, do.
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.
Having the young people engaged, involved, and being the leaders themselves is a great way to capture them intellectually and emotionally.
I would encourage anybody who's interested in any kind of science, engineering, math field, to go after that.
We thought of Uranus's atmosphere as pretty much dead. And it's not.
The Internet has made communication far more rapid. If there is a discovery, instantly around the world, anyone can confirm it.
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.
We really have only been observing Neptune with big telescopes since shortly before 1989.
I think all scientists are like detectives. We are most happy when we find something that doesn't fit our expectations.
You have to budget time for the inevitable problems that come up with children. You have to always be ahead of the game. If your proposal is due at NASA on Friday, it has to be finished on Wednesday because, on Thursday, it could be fevers and head lice.
We need to be very thoughtful about how we propose to spend the money that NASA does have for space exploration. And we need to be clear that there's the human spaceflight part of NASA, and there's the science space part of NASA, and there's also aeronautics. Those are all very different things that NASA does.
My sense, talking to the general public around the country, is that most people don't have a very high level of scientific literacy.
People seem to be afraid of science, and certainly, people seem to be afraid of mathematics. And I think that's such a shame, because I don't think it's as hard as people seem to think it is.
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.
We need to know math to be a good scientist, but math is a language, and we need to learn the language because that's the language of science.
You make sure you broaden yourself and have a good solid background in many different things. That's what you need to be a good scientist.
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.
