Birth: March 14, 1960
Specialty: Astronomy
Major Contributions:
Executive Vice President of AURA
Awarded Carl Sagan Medal, 2002
Asteroid 3530Hammel named in her honor
Image: Bill Ingalls / NASA (CC BY 2.0 DEED)
Dr. Heidi Hammel didn’t have lifelong dreams of being an astronomer. It wasn’t until her sophomore year in college, when she took her first course in the subject, that she began looking to the sky to try to answer the fundamental question, what is the fate of the universe?
Likening being an astronomer with being an explorer she explains that she gets to travel to places no one else can, all without leaving the Earth. With degrees from MIT and the University of Hawaii her postdoctoral work was at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory after which she returned to MIT, where she spent nearly nine years as a Principal Research Scientist.
With extensive experience with the Hubble Telescope she was selected to lead the team that studied the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in July 1994, with a specific focus on the atmospheric response to the collisions. In the same year, while studying Neptune, she discovered its Great Dark Spot, a storm as big as the Earth that had disappeared sometime after it had been first observed by the Voyager spacecraft in 1989.
The next year she joined the Space Science Institute in Colorado as co-Director of their research branch with her primary work focusing on outer planets and their satellites. While working with a colleague it was discovered that Uranus’ nine main rings comprise a single layer of particles, something not found in other rings. They also found an 11th ring around Uranus.
Since 2011 she has been the Executive Vice President of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy while continuing her work at SSI. In addition to her work with Hubble she is also an Interdisciplinary Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope and was a member of the Science Working Group for the giant segmented mirror telescope.
Hammel has said that she loves to be able to look into space and observe things that maybe no other human has even seen. Her research has earned her awards like the 1996 Harold C. Urey Prize. Her outreach in science communication has earned her awards like the Carl Sagan Medal. She has been profiled in Newsweek and Discover and has an asteroid named in her honor.
Written by Angela Goad
Sources:
Big Think: Becoming an Astronomer
Meet Heidi Hammel: Webb Telescope Interdisciplinary Scientist
Space Science Institute: Heidi B. Hammel
See Also:
Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy