Heidi Hammel Quotes

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

The Keck telescope, which is the largest in the world, had opened just before I began my faculty position at UCLA.

I grew up in this business... A lot of my life has been centered around this question about how NASA is helping us to understand our own home planet... and to understand our place in the universe.

Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god, but a great rock, and the sun a hot rock.

The solar system should be viewed as our backyard, not as some sequence of destinations that we do one at a time.

So I saw many planets, and they looked just a little bit brighter than they do from Earth.

The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices

We do have, and will continue to have an unquenchable curiosity to understand our Solar System.

You cannot exploit the advantages of getting above the atmosphere unless you are able to get up there reasonably large-sized telescopes and unless you are able to keep these telescopes pointing at one region of the sky for long periods of time to a high degree of accuracy.

To help enable the kind of science Hubble is performing makes my life worthwhile.

Hubble uniquely has been able to look in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a nearby star and figure out what's in that atmosphere.

It shouldn't be so difficult to determine what a planet is. When you're watching a science fiction show like 'Star Trek' and they show up at some object in space and turn on the viewfinder, the audience and the people in the show know immediately whether it's a planet or a star or a comet or an asteroid.

The Hubble images far surpassed anything taken by any telescope on Earth.

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.

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 kind of feel like I found my cause in life servicing the Hubble Space Telescope.

I think probably the discoveries made by Hubble Space Telescope have been very dramatic, very amazing.

Hubble isn't just a satellite; it's about humanity's quest for knowledge.

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

Hubble knows there is interesting stuff out there, but Hubble isn't quite big enough.

In the mind of the public, the word 'planet' carries a significance lacking in other words used to describe planetary bodies... many members of the public assume that alleged 'non-planets' cease to be interesting enough to warrant scientific exploration.

We're going to find Marses and maybe Earths out in the solar system's attic of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt.

America's space program has been the envy and inspiration of the world. It has made landmark scientific discoveries that are a lasting legacy of this nation's greatness. It has studied Earth in ways no other nation can match.

The solar system is completely wide open. Almost anywhere we go, I'm sure we would learn a lot.

I actually started my career in planetary science with a master's thesis on Pluto.