Heidi Hammel

With everyone posting/tweeting about Pi Day and Einstein’s birthday, how about another March 14 milestone: Today is the birthday of planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel, born in 1960. Her specialties are the planets Uranus and Neptune, each of which has been examined by just one spacecraft (Voyager 2). She was part of the team that discovered a giant storm on Neptune called the Great Dark Spot; she later discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope that the storm had disappeared. In 1994, Hammel led the Hubble team that watched as comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter, creating huge black spots on the planet. She is also an award-winning science communicator and an interdisciplinary scientist on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which is set for launch in 2018. (Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CC BY 2.0)

Date in History: 14 March 1960