Top 40 Heidi Hammel Quotes

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.

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.

If there were creatures on Uranus – and I don’t think there are – seasonal affective disorder would be a lifetime thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 don’t use Hubble to stare at Jupiter unless there’s a special event or some special reason.

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

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.

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.

C is a passing grade. You don’t need straight A’s to be a scientist, despite what you may have heard.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

My message is don’t be discouraged by anything anybody tells you. In my case of the science thing, and I just ignored people who said, ‘Oh, girls don’t do that.’

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

The Hubble Telescope can see the farthest galaxies. The Webb Telescope will see the farthest stars.

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.

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.

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

Weather forecast for Jupiter’s South Equatorial Belt: cloudy with a chance of ammonia.

Technological prescience in science fiction usually requires an author with luck. Societal prescience requires a poet.

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.

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

Hubble orbits high, outside Earth’s atmosphere so it can see a wide spectrum of light our atmosphere blocks.

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.

We live inside the atmosphere of an active star.

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.’

There should be a water table on Mars.

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