Heidi Mutton
Heidi B. Hammel (born March 14, 1960 in California ) is an American planetologist who specializes in the planets Uranus and Neptune .
Hammel graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor's degree in 1982 and received his PhD from the University of Hawaii in 1988 . As a post-doctoral student , she was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (as a member of the Voyager 2 team on the Neptune flyby) and then back at MIT. In 1994 she directed the optical observation of the impact of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in Jupiter with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Later she mainly observed Uranus and Neptune with the HST and the Keck telescope (as well as other telescopes such as Gemini and Spitzer).
In 1996 the asteroid (3530) Mutton was named after her. From 1998 she was a senior scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, where she is co-director for research. In 2011 she also became Executive Vice President of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), a consortium that was also behind HST. She is an interdisciplinary scientist at the James Webb Space Telescope .
One focus of her research is the weather on Uranus and Neptune. She was part of the team that found the Great Dark Spot on Neptune (a cyclone similar to the large red spot on Jupiter) and the highest wind speeds measured so far in the solar system (also on Neptune).
In 2002 she was named one of Discover Magazine's 50 Top Women Scientists. She received the Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in Public Communication in Planetary Science (2002) for her medial communication of planetology in public, the Klumpke-Roberts Award (1995) from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and the Harold-C.-Urey- Price (1996). In 2000 she became a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .
She lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut, is married with three children.
literature
- Fred Bortz: Beyond Jupiter: The Story of Planetary Astronomer Heidi Hammel, National Academy of Sciences
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Mutton, Heidi |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Hammel, Heidi B. |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American planetologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 14, 1960 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | California |