Heidi Hammel Quotes

You see billions and billions of stars and recognize that you know some of those have planets, too, and maybe there's life out there, and this is just one of billions of galaxies... and so it gives you this huge perspective of how far we potentially have to go for real exploration.

We are now able to put our minds in other places in the universe with the use of telescopes. That is very exciting.

I think the driving thing was curiosity about the universe. That fascinated me. I didn't think anything about being famous or anything like that, I was just interested in the concepts involved.

I think a scientist's job is to explore the Universe, to explore the cosmos around us. People always want to know - why is that useful? Well, on just pure fundamental grounds, on some level it's like art, it's like umm, music, it's aesthetics, it's like philosophy. You want to know where you are in the Universe.

The public has an incredible capacity for appreciating the wonder of our planet, our solar system, our universe.

Thinking about the universe has now been handed over to specialists. The rest of us merely read about it.

There are a lot of things you can do in space, and space essentially is unlimited resources. We are climbing over ourselves here looking for the next source of energy. The universe has an unlimited source of energy.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

I am very interested in the Universe - I am specialising in the Universe and all that surrounds it.

The universe is a great mystery.

The cosmic game changed forever in 1992. Before then, logic told us that there had to be other planets besides the nine (if you still count poor Pluto) in our solar system, but until that year, when two astronomers detected faint, telltale radio signals in the constellation Virgo, we had no hard evidence of their existence.

In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves. From sitting at the center of the universe, we now find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy.

In 'Cosmicomics,' I came close to science fiction - I was inspired by cosmological subjects and the workings of the universe and invented a character who was a sort of witness to everything that was happening inside the solar system.

A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

The natural phenomenon of the universe is so mind-blowing, but you have to know about it. You have to be curious. You've got to find it on your own. If you're lucky, you do.

The book that blew the doors off the house, grabbing me with its breathtakingly deep and irresistible view of the universe and our relation to it, was 'Intelligent Life in the Universe' by I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan. I recall an enchanting all-nighter completing a college homework assignment to read the first chapter.

Just speaking for myself, I think the return of people to the Moon has a lot to offer for understanding the formation and evolution of terrestrial worlds; so would the exploration of near-Earth asteroids by people.

We may have a tacit understanding of how our solar system works, but watching the sun disappear behind the moon reminds us of the vastness of space and the enduring mysteries of the universe we inhabit.

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.

As a planetary system, Saturn holds the greatest promise for answering questions that have a far broader scientific reach than Saturn itself.

Back before the Kuiper Belt was discovered, Pluto did look like a misfit that didn't belong with either the terrestrials or the giant planets.

We've explored every type of environment in the solar system at least once.

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.

There was a time when Pluto - which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led - was considered the last planet. We now know there are thousands of other - possibly inhabited - planets.