The Hubble Telescope can see the farthest galaxies. The Webb Telescope will see the farthest stars.
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.
No one planet can tell us everything about the universe, but Neptune seems to hold more than its share of information about the formation of our own solar system - as well as the solar systems beyond.
Neptune's unusual behavior is showing us that though we can make great models of planetary atmospheric circulation, there may be key pieces missing.
Every observation that we make, every mission that we send to various places in the solar system is just taking us one step further to finding that truly habitable environment, a water-rich environment.
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.
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.
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.
Ultimately, life is a chemical interaction.
We need people pushing the boundaries. Exploration is what we, as humans, do.
Having the young people engaged, involved, and being the leaders themselves is a great way to capture them intellectually and emotionally.
I would encourage anybody who's interested in any kind of science, engineering, math field, to go after that.
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.
C is a passing grade. You don't need straight A's to be a scientist, despite what you may have heard.
We thought of Uranus's atmosphere as pretty much dead. And it's not.
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.'
The Internet has made communication far more rapid. If there is a discovery, instantly around the world, anyone can confirm it.
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.
What I want to look at with Webb is what we call ice giants in our solar system - the planets Neptune and Uranus.
Hubble is absolutely unique; we must have a telescope in space to complement the very large telescopes on the ground.
