Carolyn Porco

Carolyn C. Porco is an American planetary scientist and the leader of the imaging science team on the Cassini mission^[1],[2],[3] presently in orbit around Saturn. In late 1999, she was selected by the London Sunday Times as one of 18 scientific leaders of the 21st century, and by Industrial Week as one of "50 Stars to Watch".^[4] Porco was responsible for the epitaph and proposal to honor the late renowned planetary geologist, Eugene Shoemaker, by sending his cremains to the Moon aboard the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1998.^[5],[6] Her contributions to the exploration of the outer solar system were recognized with the naming of Asteroid (7231) Porco: "Named in honor of Carolyn C. Porco, a pioneer in the study of planetary ring systems...and a leader in spacecraft exploration of the outer solar system". Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 402 × 599 pixels Full resolution (1364 × 2032 pixel, file size: 811 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) This work is copyrighted (by Carolyn Porco) and unlicensed. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 402 × 599 pixels Full resolution (1364 × 2032 pixel, file size: 811 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) This work is copyrighted (by Carolyn Porco) and unlicensed. ... Planetary science, also known as planetology or planetary astronomy, is the science of planets, or planetary systems, and the solar system. ...

Porco was an imaging scientist on the Voyager mission in the 1980s, and is also an imaging scientist on the New Horizons^[7] mission launched to Pluto on January 19, 2006. She is foremost an expert on planetary rings. As a young Voyager scientist, she was the first person to describe the behavior of the eccentric ringlets and the "spokes" discovered by Voyager within the rings of Saturn, to elucidate the mechanism by which the outer Uranian rings were being shepherded by the Voyager-discovered moons Cordelia and Ophelia, and to provide an explanation for the shepherding of the rings arcs of Neptune by the moon Galatea, also discovered by Voyager. She was a co-originator of the idea to take a 'portrait of the planets' with the Voyager spacecraft, and participated in the planning, design, and execution of those images in 1991, including the famous Pale Blue Dot image of Earth.^[8]

She has co-authored over 70 scientific papers on subjects ranging from the spectroscopy of Uranus and Neptune, the interstellar medium, the photometry of planetary rings, satellite/ring interactions, computer simulations of planetary rings, the thermal balance of Triton’s polar caps, heat flow in the interior of Jupiter, and a suite of results on the atmosphere, satellites, and rings of Saturn from the Cassini imaging experiment.^[9] She and her team discovered 4 moons around Saturn: Methone, Pallene, Polydeuces, and Daphnis.^{[10],[11],[12],[13],[14],[15]} They also have found several new rings, such as rings coincident with the orbits of Atlas, Janus and Epimetheus (the Saturnian 'co-orbitals'), and Pallene, a diffuse ring between Atlas and the F ring, and new rings within several of the gaps in Saturn's rings. Recently, she has turned her scientific investigations to the study of Enceladus and its now-famous jets. She and her team first suggested, and provided detailed scientific arguments, that these jets might be geysers erupting from reservoirs of near-surface liquid water under the south pole of the small moon.^[16]

Porco received her Ph.D. degree in 1983 from the California Institute of Technology in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. Her doctoral dissertation focused on Voyager discoveries in the rings of Saturn and was supervised by renowned dynamicist Peter Goldreich. In the fall of 1983, she joined the faculty in the Department of Planetary Sciences within the University of Arizona; the same year she was made a member of the Voyager Imaging Team. In the latter capacity, she was an active participant in the Voyager encounters with Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989, leading the Rings Working Group within the Voyager Imaging Team during the Neptune encounter. Peter Goldreich (born July 14, 1939) is a U.S. astrophysicist. ...

Carolyn Porco giving the opening presentation at the 2007 TED conference "Icons, Geniuses, Mavericks" in Monterey, California.

In November 1990, she was selected as the leader of the Imaging Team for the Cassini mission^[1],[2],[3] to Saturn, an international mission that successfully placed a spacecraft in orbit around Saturn, and deployed the atmospheric Huygens probe to Saturn's largest satellite, Titan. She is also the Director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS (CICLOPS), which is the center of uplink and downlink operations for the Cassini imaging science experiment, and the place where Cassini images are processed for release to the public. CICLOPS is part of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ...

As a tenured faculty member at the University of Arizona, she has taught both graduates and undergraduates and was one of 5 finalists for the University of Arizona Honors Center "Five Star Faculty Award", a campus-wide student-nominated, student-judged award for outstanding undergraduate teaching. Porco is currently a Senior Research Scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

She has been an active participant in guiding the American planetary exploration program through membership on many important NASA advisory committees, including the Solar System Exploration Subcommittee, the Mars Observer Recovery Study Team, and the Solar System Road Map Development Team. In the mid-1990’s, she served as the chairperson for a small NASA advisory working group to study and develop future outer solar system missions and she served as the Vice Chairperson of the Steering Group for the Solar System Decadal Survey, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and NASA. This article is about the American space agency. ... This article is about the American space agency. ... This article is about the American space agency. ...

Carolyn Porco giving the opening presentation at the 2007 TED conference "Icons, Geniuses, Mavericks" in Monterey, California.

Porco has been a regular CNN guest analyst and consultant on astronomy, has made many radio and television appearances explaining science to the layman, including appearances on the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, CBS' "60 Minutes", Peter Jennings' "The Century", and TV documentaries on planetary exploration such as "Cosmic Journey: The Voyager Interstellar Mission and Message" on A&E, "The Planets" on the Discovery Channel and the BBC, Horizon on the BBC, and a Nova Cassini special on PBS. In addition, Porco "served as an adviser for the 1997 film Contact, which was based on a novel by the well-known astronomer Carl Sagan. The actress Jodie Foster portrayed the heroine in the movie, and Sagan reportedly suggested that she use Porco as a real-life model to guide her performance".^[17] Prior to Cassini’s launch, she was a strong and visible defendant of the usage of radioactive materials on the Cassini spacecraft. She is a supporter of the re-direction of NASA’s humanflight program towards the Moon and Mars, and in an OpEd piece^[18] published in the New York times, highlighted the benefits of the new direction for the robotic exploration of the solar system. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... This article is about the American space agency. ...

Carolyn (at right) re-enacting the famous Beatles photograph at Abbey Road with the other members of the Cassini Imaging Team.

She has also given many newspaper and magazine interviews on subjects ranging from planetary exploration to the conflict between science and religion (e.g., Newsweek^[19],[20] and the New York Times), and has been profiled many times in print, beginning in 1989 in the (Boston Globe (October, 1989), in the New York Times (August 1999),^[21] in the Tucson Citizen (2001),^[22] in Newsday (June 2004), and in Astronomy Now (2006),^[23] and online on CNN.com (2005), on the Edge.org ^[24], on the Facts.com,^[17] and Space.com.^[25] Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Abbey Road can refer to: Abbey Road (street), a street in London, England Abbey Road Studios, a recording studio complex owned by the EMI company Abbey Road (album), by The Beatles, 1969 The Abbey Road E.P., by Red Hot Chili Peppers Abbey Road (unreleased b side) , by Tori Amos...

Porco was a member of a committee chaired by Carl Sagan in 1994 entitled "Public Communication of NASA's Science". Her popular science articles have been published in the London Sunday Times, the Guardian, Astronomy Magazine, the Arizona Daily Star, and Sky and Telescope. She continues to be active in the presentation of science to the public as the leader of the Cassini Imaging Team. She is the creator/editor of the team's CICLOPS website where Cassini images are posted, and writes the site's homepage "Captain's Log" greeting to the public. This article is about the American space agency. ...

She is also the CEO of Diamond Sky Productions, a small company devoted to the scientific, as well as artful, use of planetary images and computer graphics for the presentation of science to the public.

Porco is famously fascinated by the 1960s and The Beatles and has, at times, incorporated references to The Beatles and their music into her presentations, writings, and press releases. The first color image released by Cassini to the public was an image of Jupiter, taken during Cassini’s approach to the giant planet and released on October 9, 2000 to honor John Lennon’s 60^th birthday.^[26] In 2006, she produced and directed a brief 8-minute movie of 64 of Cassini’s most spectacular images,^[27] put to the music of the Beatles, in honor of Paul McCartney’s 64^th birthday. And in 2007, she produced a poster showing the sixty-four scenes from Saturn, which she sent to the former Beattle, Paul McCartney.^[28]

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Cassini-Huygens: Mission to Saturn & Titan
2. ^ ^{a b} Cassini-Huygens: Close Encounter with Saturn
3. ^ ^{a b} Cassini-Huygens
4. ^ "50 R&D Stars To Watch"
5. ^ Destination Moon
6. ^ Eugene M. Shoemaker: A Tribute
7. ^ New Horizons: NASA's Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission
8. ^ C. Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997)
9. ^ CICLOPS Science Objectives and Results
10. ^ IAUC 8389 - discovery of S/2004 S 1 (Methone) and S/2004 S 2 (Pallene)
11. ^ IAUC 8432 - discovery of S/2004 S 5 (Polydeuces) (November 8, 2004)
12. ^ IAUC 8471 - naming of Methone and Pallene (January 21, 2005)
13. ^ IAUC 8471 - naming of Polydeuces (January 21, 2005)
14. ^ IAUC 8524: discovery of S/2005 S 1 (Daphnis)
15. ^ C. C. Porco et al. "Cassini Imaging Science: Initial Results on Saturn's Rings and Small Satellites". Science, vol. 307, no. 5713, pp. 1226-1236
16. ^ C. C. Porco, et al. "Cassini Observes the Active South Pole of Enceladus", Science, vol. 311, no. 5766, 2006, pp. 1393-1401
17. ^ ^{a b} Carolyn Porco: Captain's Log July 2015
18. ^ NASA Goes Deep
19. ^ Losing Our Religion
20. ^ The New Naysayers
21. ^ Carolyn Porco: Cassini Scientist Yielded to the Seduction of Space
22. ^ Carolyn Porco profile in the Tucson Citizen
23. ^ Carolyn Porco: the biggest, baddest team leader of them all
24. ^ Carolyn Porco profile on the Edge.org website
25. ^ Carolyn Porco: Keeping an Eye in Saturn
26. ^ Jupiter & Europa in True Color
27. ^ Sixty-Four Scenes From Saturn
28. ^ Sixty-Four Scenes from Saturn ... The Poster

This article is about the American space agency. ... November 8 is the 312th day of the year (313th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 53 days remaining. ... 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... January 21 is the 21st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... January 21 is the 21st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

External links

• Podcast on the Cassini mission by Carolyn Porco