Scientist

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

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.

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-like, from civilization's ashes.

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

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

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.

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.'

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.

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

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

You make sure you broaden yourself and have a good solid background in many different things. That's what you need to be a good scientist.

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

There should be a water table on Mars.

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

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

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

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.'

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.

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

We thought of Uranus's atmosphere as pretty much dead. And it's not.