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.”

“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.”

“There's this myth that science is hard. But everything is hard.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The Hubble program has been so fantastically successful. It's more than what anyone expected.”

“I think all scientists are like detectives. We are most happy when we find something that doesn't fit our expectations.”

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

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“By monitoring auroral activity on exoplanets, we may be able to infer the presence of water on or within an exoplanet.”

“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.”