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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.
Hubble wasn't designed to look at objects in our solar system, but after it was launched, astronomers realized that with just a little bit of modification to the software, it could look at solar system objects.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People have this idea that if you're not brilliant like Einstein, you can't be a scientist. And that's just a myth. He was the one out of a million scientists, but there were 999,999 other scientists who were not as brilliant but who just do great science, as well.
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.
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.
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 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.
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. And NASA's budget is part of a discretionary budget, and we can't make that bigger without taking away other things.
I think religion and science operate in different regimes. Religion is a belief system that tries to give meaning and comprehension to peoples' lives. Science is more about the mechanics of the universe around us and the way in which it works. And I don't think those things have to be mutually exclusive.
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 been looking forward to doing with Hubble was studying outer planets in our solar system, the planets Uranus and Neptune.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.