Scientist

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.

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

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 was flabbergasted.

We live inside the atmosphere of an active star.

We've explored every type of environment in the solar system at least once.

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.

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.

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 - every field has questions that are awaiting the power of Hubble.

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.

I went to MIT. I do rocket science. Being a mom is much harder.

Together, NASA and Hubble are opening new vistas on the universe.

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.