Claude Nicollier Quotes

For a long time, we've worked on detecting planets with whatever was at hand, making use of existing small telescopes or even amateur telescopes. It's time to move on to the next stage.

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.

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

Gentlemen. Build your telescope but just make sure that it is the biggest one in the world because I won’t pay for anything else.

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

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.

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.

The James Webb Space Telescope was specifically designed to see the first stars and galaxies that were formed in the universe.

We are involved in technology development for, you know, missions that we hope to plan that would take us to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.

After decades of hauling telescopes around in the back of vans and going up to high altitude locations and so forth, I did finally build an observatory, here on Sonoma mountain.

I saw, in looking over Cooper, elements of a comet of 1825 which resemble what I get out for this, from my own observations, but I cannot rely upon my own.

Until very recently, the heavenly bodies have been investigated only with reference to their position and their laws of motion, and a quarter of a century ago astronomy was little more than celestial topography.

I have worn myself thin trying to find out about this comet, and I know very little now in the matter.

A hybrid human-robot mission to investigate an asteroid affords a realistic opportunity to demonstrate new technological capabilities for future deep-space travel and to test spacecraft for long-duration spaceflight.

Hubble is very close to my heart, and going back to Hubble, because I was there once already in 1993, is really a great privilege for me.

On one hand, to be able to go from one direction in the sky to study such an object to another direction to study another object, and on the other hand to be able to maintain accurately the position in space.

The planets are never the same twice, they're always different, so they could compare the markings I had drawn with their current photographs and they knew that I was drawing what I was really seeing and it wasn't copied from somewhere.

The Next Generation Space Telescope, which will be located much further away from the Earth than the Hubble Space Telescope presently is, will also explore the infrared part of the spectrum.

Classifying the stars has helped materially in all studies of the structure of the universe.

Whenever a total eclipse of the sun was visible in an accessible region parties were sent out to observe it.

The reason we have the stars twinkle at night is because the light is being kind of blurred by the atmosphere around the Earth. That is why the Hubble Space Telescope is so good, because it is above the atmosphere. So it is kind of like looking at the sun from the bottom of a swimming pool, versus looking at the sun above the swimming pool.

The first year I was at NASA, I was only responsible for optical and ultraviolet astronomy. Frankly, there wasn't much else.

Since the Moon has no atmosphere, it presents a unique orbital opportunity - we could fly incredibly close to the surface while staying in lunar orbit.

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.