“We need people pushing the boundaries. Exploration is what we, as humans, do.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.’”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“We’ve explored every type of environment in the solar system at least once.”
― Heidi Hammel
“Weather forecast for Jupiter’s South Equatorial Belt: cloudy with a chance of ammonia.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“By monitoring auroral activity on exoplanets, we may be able to infer the presence of water on or within an exoplanet.”
― Heidi Hammel
“Technological prescience in science fiction usually requires an author with luck. Societal prescience requires a poet.”
― Heidi Hammel
“We really have only been observing Neptune with big telescopes since shortly before 1989.”
― Heidi Hammel
“I think all scientists are like detectives. We are most happy when we find something that doesn’t fit our expectations.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“We thought of Uranus’s atmosphere as pretty much dead. And it’s not.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“My sense, talking to the general public around the country, is that most people don’t have a very high level of scientific literacy.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.’”
― Heidi Hammel
“C is a passing grade. You don’t need straight A’s to be a scientist, despite what you may have heard.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“Because exploration is not science driven, you’ve got to ask what is it driven by? And it’s driven by politics.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“I would encourage anybody who’s interested in any kind of science, engineering, math field, to go after that.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“Neptune’s unusual behavior is showing us that though we can make great models of planetary atmospheric circulation, there may be key pieces missing.”
― Heidi Hammel
“There should be a water table on Mars.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“Ultimately, life is a chemical interaction.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“Planetary missions are great, but they’re usually only brief snapshots of those planets and also really very close-up.”
― Heidi Hammel
“If there were creatures on Uranus – and I don’t think there are – seasonal affective disorder would be a lifetime thing.”
― Heidi Hammel
“Together, NASA and Hubble are opening new vistas on the universe.”
― Heidi Hammel
“Having the young people engaged, involved, and being the leaders themselves is a great way to capture them intellectually and emotionally.”
― Heidi Hammel
“We live inside the atmosphere of an active star.”
― Heidi Hammel
“The Internet has made communication far more rapid. If there is a discovery, instantly around the world, anyone can confirm it.”
― Heidi Hammel
“We don’t use Hubble to stare at Jupiter unless there’s a special event or some special reason.”
― Heidi Hammel
“Hubble made my career.”
― Heidi Hammel
“The Hubble images far surpassed anything taken by any telescope on Earth.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“I went to MIT. I do rocket science. Being a mom is much harder.”
― Heidi Hammel
“There’s this myth that science is hard. But everything is hard.”
― Heidi Hammel
“The Hubble Telescope can see the farthest galaxies. The Webb Telescope will see the farthest stars.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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
“Hubble orbits high, outside Earth’s atmosphere so it can see a wide spectrum of light our atmosphere blocks.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“The whole Hubble program has just been a fabulous testament to the NASA science community and the NASA astronaut community.”
― Heidi Hammel
“The Hubble program has been so fantastically successful. It’s more than what anyone expected.”
― Heidi Hammel
“What I want to look at with Webb is what we call ice giants in our solar system – the planets Neptune and Uranus.”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― 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!’”
― Heidi Hammel
“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.”
― Heidi Hammel
“Hubble is absolutely unique; we must have a telescope in space to complement the very large telescopes on the ground.”
― Heidi Hammel
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