Quotes from Heidi Hammel

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

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.

C is a passing grade. You don't need straight A's to be a scientist, despite what you may have heard.

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.

When I was in college, I didn't like physics a lot, and I really wasn't very good at physics. And there were a lot of people around me who were really good at physics: I mean, scary good at physics. And they weren't much help to me, because I would say, 'How do you do this?' They'd say, 'Well, the answer's obvious.'

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.

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.

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

Webb will return extremely interesting measurements of chemistry in the Martian atmosphere. And most importantly, these Mars data will be immediately available to the planetary community to enable them to plan even more detailed Mars observations with Webb in future cycles.

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

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.

Weather forecast for Jupiter's South Equatorial Belt: cloudy with a chance of ammonia.

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 Wednesday because, on Thursday, it could be fevers and head lice.

Scientists normally like to do experiments. You know, they like to mix this with that and see what happens. They like to take this thing and poke it and see how it reacts. In astronomy, we can't do that. The stars, the planets, the galaxies, are so far away that we just look at them, and we have to learn things by looking at them.

There are amateurs who have seen that one of Uranus' poles is brighter than the other, or who have seen cloud formations on the planet. For all we know, interesting things are happening there all the time.

One of the things I've learned that has made me very successful, I think, as a scientist in general, sometimes you just have to take a chance.

My sense, talking to the general public around the country, is that most people don't have a very high level of scientific literacy.

Whatever I was going into, whether it was going to be chorus or history or astronomy or whatever, do it right. Be a professional. Don't just do a half baked job. Do everything correctly. Get down. Learn the details of what you're going to do.

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

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

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.

Because exploration is not science driven, you've got to ask what is it driven by? And it's driven by politics.

Technological prescience in science fiction usually requires an author with luck. Societal prescience requires a poet.

The Hubble Telescope can see the farthest galaxies. The Webb Telescope will see the farthest stars.