Top 40 Heidi Hammel Quotes

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.

There should be a water table on Mars.

There’s this myth that science is hard. But everything is hard.

Even after years of observing, a new picture of Uranus from Keck Observatory can stop me in my tracks and make me say, ‘Wow!’

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.

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.

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 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.’

Planetary missions are great, but they’re usually only brief snapshots of those planets and also really very close-up.

We need people pushing the boundaries. Exploration is what we, as humans, do.

What I want to look at with Webb is what we call ice giants in our solar system – the planets Neptune and Uranus.

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.

I think we need to be very careful if we want to do things like further modify our atmosphere. And similarly, I think we need to be very worried about unintentional modification, which is basically what’s been going on.

Every field of astrophysics – whether it’s our local neighborhood of planets, nearby stars and their attendant planets, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, out to the edge of the universe – every field has questions that are awaiting the power of Hubble.

The whole Hubble program has just been a fabulous testament to the NASA science community and the NASA astronaut community.

The Internet has made communication far more rapid. If there is a discovery, instantly around the world, anyone can confirm it.

Neptune’s unusual behavior is showing us that though we can make great models of planetary atmospheric circulation, there may be key pieces missing.

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.

Because exploration is not science driven, you’ve got to ask what is it driven by? And it’s driven by politics.

Together, NASA and Hubble are opening new vistas on the universe.

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.

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.

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.

Being insignificant statistically doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong. It just means you don’t have enough data to show yes or no.

We really have only been observing Neptune with big telescopes since shortly before 1989.

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.

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.

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.

We live inside the atmosphere of an active star.

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.

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.

I would encourage anybody who’s interested in any kind of science, engineering, math field, to go after that.

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.

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.

Hubble made my career.

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.

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.

My sense, talking to the general public around the country, is that most people don’t have a very high level of scientific literacy.

Ultimately, life is a chemical interaction.