Quotes from Heidi Hammel

Hubble is absolutely unique; we must have a telescope in space to complement the very large telescopes on the ground.

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

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

The whole Hubble program has just been a fabulous testament to the NASA science community and the NASA astronaut community.

We need people pushing the boundaries. Exploration is what we, as humans, do.

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.

If I see something that seems out of sync with what's already known, the first thing I do is try to find out what's wrong with the data. Once you've done that, and it still seems wrong, that's when things get interesting. It means you've found something new to understand.

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 know about ice ages. We know when our continent was covered with ice sheets. We know glaciers come and they go. It puzzles me that people forget that.

We need to be very thoughtful about how we propose to spend the money that NASA does have for space exploration. And we need to be clear that there's the human spaceflight part of NASA, and there's the science space part of NASA, and there's also aeronautics. Those are all very different things that NASA does.

The Internet has made communication far more rapid. If there is a discovery, instantly around the world, anyone can confirm it.

I feel like an old-fashioned mountain climber when I am making discoveries, seeing something for the first time, realizing that no human before me has ever seen what I am seeing. It takes your breath away - for just a moment, you feel a pause in time, as you know you are crossing a boundary into a new realm of knowledge.

I would say the biggest challenge I had as a woman in science is be a mom. It's really hard. It's very hard work having children, and I tell kids this all the time.

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 fragment of an asteroid or a comet hitting our atmosphere and burning up as it hits in, as it comes in.

I'm happy here on the surface of the earth. If space travel ever got to be as simple as jet travel today, yeah, I'd take a jet flight to the moon.

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 to actually have a landed flight to the moon and brought back our American flag and put it in Tiananmen Square.

Climates always change. The question is, how are we going to adapt to climate change? Now, it may be true that we are accelerating it inadvertently by messing with our atmosphere, but regardless of that, the climate will change.

The Hubble program has been so fantastically successful. It's more than what anyone expected.

Hubble made my career.

I think we need to be very careful if we want to do things like further modify our atmosphere. And similarly, I think we need to be very worried about unintentional modification, which is basically what's been going on.

I have a little piece of Hubble that someone brought back from one of the repair missions. It's on my desk, where I work. I do feel a personal connection to it. It's been part of my life for 20 years.

My message is don't be discouraged by anything anybody tells you. In my case of the science thing, and I just ignored people who said, 'Oh, girls don't do that.'

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

Being insignificant statistically doesn't mean it's right or wrong. It just means you don't have enough data to show yes or no.

Having the young people engaged, involved, and being the leaders themselves is a great way to capture them intellectually and emotionally.