We've explored every type of environment in the solar system at least once.
— 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!'
What I want to look at with Webb is what we call ice giants in our solar system - the planets Neptune and Uranus.
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.
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.
I went to MIT. I do rocket science. Being a mom is much harder.
By monitoring auroral activity on exoplanets, we may be able to infer the presence of water on or within an exoplanet.
Hubble made my career.
We need people pushing the boundaries. Exploration is what we, as humans, do.
Having the young people engaged, involved, and being the leaders themselves is a great way to capture them intellectually and emotionally.
Planetary missions are great, but they're usually only brief snapshots of those planets and also really very close-up.
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.
Weather forecast for Jupiter's South Equatorial Belt: cloudy with a chance of ammonia.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
Hubble is absolutely unique; we must have a telescope in space to complement the very large telescopes on the ground.
We really have only been observing Neptune with big telescopes since shortly before 1989.
The Hubble program has been so fantastically successful. It's more than what anyone expected.
Hubble orbits high, outside Earth's atmosphere so it can see a wide spectrum of light our atmosphere blocks.
The Hubble Telescope can see the farthest galaxies. The Webb Telescope will see the farthest stars.
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.
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.
We don't use Hubble to stare at Jupiter unless there's a special event or some special reason.
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.
Together, NASA and Hubble are opening new vistas on the universe.
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.
Ultimately, life is a chemical interaction.
There should be a water table on Mars.
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.
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.
It's very clear that global climate change is occurring on earth, but it's also been very clear that that has always happened on earth. We've always had a changing climate on earth. We all know about ice ages. We know when our continent was covered with ice sheets. We know glaciers come and they go. It puzzles me that people forget that.
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.
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.
The whole Hubble program has just been a fabulous testament to the NASA science community and the NASA astronaut community.
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.
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.
The Hubble images far surpassed anything taken by any telescope on Earth.
The Internet has made communication far more rapid. If there is a discovery, instantly around the world, anyone can confirm it.
We live inside the atmosphere of an active star.
If there were creatures on Uranus - and I don't think there are - seasonal affective disorder would be a lifetime thing.
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.
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.
Neptune's unusual behavior is showing us that though we can make great models of planetary atmospheric circulation, there may be key pieces missing.
I would encourage anybody who's interested in any kind of science, engineering, math field, to go after that.
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.
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.
