Heidi Hammel

“If there were creatures on Uranus - and I don't think there are - seasonal affective disorder would be a lifetime thing.”

“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...”

“Neptune's unusual behavior is showing us that though we can make great models of planetary atmospheric circulation, there may be key pieces missing.”

“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 - ever...”

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

“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.”

“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 fr...”

“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...”

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

“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. A...”

“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-...”

“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 k...”

“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...”

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

“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 W...”

“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 bee...”

“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 syste...”

“What I want to look at with Webb is what we call ice giants in our solar system - the planets Neptune and Uranus.”

“We really have only been observing Neptune with big telescopes since shortly before 1989.”

“Even after years of observing, a new picture of Uranus from Keck Observatory can stop me in my tracks and make me say, 'Wow!'”