Carolyn Porco

She has co-authored more than 110 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. In 2013, Cassini data confirmed a 1993 prediction by Porco and Mark Marley that acoustic oscillations within the body of Saturn are responsible for creating particular features in the rings of Saturn. Porco was founder of The Day the Earth Smiled. She was also responsible for the epitaph and proposal to honor the renowned planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker by sending his cremains to the Moon aboard the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1998. A frequent public speaker, Porco has given two popular lectures at TED as well as the opening speech for Pangea Day, a May 2008 global broadcast coordinated from six cities around the world, in which she described the cosmic context for human existence. Porco has also won a number of awards and honors for her contributions to science and the public sphere; for instance, in 2009, New Statesman named her as one of 'The 50 People Who Matter Today.' In 2010, Porco was awarded the Carl Sagan Medal, presented by the American Astronomical Society for Excellence in the Communication of Science to the Public. In 2012, she was named one of the 25 most influential people in space by Time magazine.

Carolyn Porco studied at California Institute of Technology, Stony Brook University and Cardinal Spellman High School. Training under Peter Goldreich is recorded. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is planetary science. Employment is recorded with University of Arizona, University of Colorado Boulder and Space Science Institute. Distinctions recorded are Lennart Nilsson Award, Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in Public Communication in Planetary Science, Isaac Asimov Science Award and Leif Erikson Awards.

• Name — Carolyn Porco • Born — 6 March 1953 • Birthplace — Bronx, New York, U.S. • Fields — Planetary science Imaging science • Workplaces — Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations, University of Colorado at Boulder • Education — California Institute of Technology Stony Brook University • Doctoral Advisor — Peter Goldreich • Known for — Leader of Cassini Imaging Team; Discoveries about Saturn system; Member of Voyager Imaging Team; Expert in Planetary rings and Enceladus; The Day the Earth Smiled; Science communicator & public speaker; Film consultant. • Awards — Porco asteroid; Lennart Nilsson Award (2009); AAS Carl Sagan Medal (2010); Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award (2011); Time 25 Most Influential People in Space (2012)

Porco was born in New York City. She graduated in 1970 from Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx, New York City. She earned a B.S. degree in Earth and Space Sciences from Stony Brook University in 1974. She received her Ph.D. degree in Planetary Sciences in 1983 from the California Institute of Technology in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. Supervised by dynamicist Peter Goldreich, she wrote her doctoral dissertation focused on Voyager discoveries in the rings of Saturn.

In the fall of 1983, Porco joined the faculty of the Department of Planetary Sciences at 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 2 encounters with Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989, leading the Rings Working Group within the Voyager Imaging Team during the Neptune encounter. Porco 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 1 spacecraft, and participated in the planning, design, and execution of those images in 1990, including the famous Pale Blue Dot image of Earth.

• Illustration — Porco at Star Talk Live, 2016. In November 1990, Porco was selected as the leader of the Imaging Team for the Cassini-Huygens mission, 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 was 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. In the course of the ongoing mission, Porco and her team have discovered seven moons of Saturn: Methone and Pallene, Polydeuces, Daphnis, Anthe, Aegaeon, and a small moonlet in the outer B ring. They also 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. In 2013, Cassini data confirmed a 1993 prediction by Porco and Mark Marley that acoustic oscillations within the body of Saturn are responsible for creating particular features in the rings of Saturn. This confirmation, the first to demonstrate that planetary rings can act like a seismograph in recording oscillatory motions within the host planet, should provide new constraints on the interior structure of Saturn. Such oscillations are known to exist in the sun as well as other stars. Porco's team was responsible for the first sighting of a hydrocarbon lake, as well as a lake district, in the south polar region of Titan in June 2005. (A group of similar – and larger – features were sighted in the north polar region in February 2007.) The possibility that these sea-sized features are either completely or partially filled with liquid hydrocarbons is significantly strengthened by subsequent observations by other Cassini instruments. Her team was also responsible for the first sighting of plumes erupting from Enceladus, Saturn's sixth largest moon. They 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.

Porco was a member of the imaging team for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt through 2014. The probe made its Pluto flyby in 2015.

As the Cassini imaging team lead, Porco initiated and planned the capture of a picture of Saturn with the Earth in the distance on July 19, 2013, an image along the lines of the famous Pale Blue Dot photo. The taking of the image was part of a larger concept entitled The Day The Earth Smiled, in which people the world over were invited to celebrate humanity's place in the cosmos and life on Earth by smiling the moment the picture was taken.

Porco served in the faculty of the University of Arizona from 1983 to 2001, achieving tenured professorship in 1991. She taught both graduates and undergraduates and was one of five 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 a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and she is an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Porco 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-1990s, 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 first Solar System Decadal Survey, sponsored by NASA and the National Academy of Sciences.

• Illustration — Porco in 2008. Porco speaks frequently on the Cassini mission and planetary exploration in general, and has appeared at renowned conferences such as PopTech 2005 and TED (2007, 2009). She attended and was a speaker at the Beyond Belief symposium in November 2006. Porco's 2007 TED talk, "The Human Journey," detailed two major areas of discovery made by the Cassini mission: the exploration of the Saturnian moons Titan and Enceladus. In her introductory remarks, Porco explained: So the journey back to Saturn is really part of, and is also a metaphor for, a much larger human voyage. In describing the environment of Titan, with its molecular nitrogen atmosphere suffused with organic compounds, Porco invited her audience to imagine the scene on the moon's surface: • Illustration — Porco speaking at the 2016 Starmus Festival. After describing various features discovered on Titan by Cassini, and presenting the historic first photograph of Titan's surface by the Huygens lander, Porco went on to describe Enceladus and the jets of "fine icy particles" which erupt from the moon's southern pole: Porco's 2009 TED Talk was "Could a Saturn moon harbor life?". She was a speaker at the 2016 Reason Rally.

Porco has given numerous interviews in print media on subjects ranging from planetary exploration to the conflict between science and religion (for example, Newsweek and the journal The Humanist). She has been profiled many times in print, beginning in the Boston Globe (October 1989), The New York Times (August 1999, September 2009), the Tucson Citizen (2001), Newsday (June 2004), for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (2006), in Astronomy Now (2006), in Discover Magazine (2007), and also online on CNN.com (2005) and Edge.org. Prior to Cassinis launch, she was a strong and visible defendant of the usage of radioactive materials on the Cassini spacecraft. She is a supporter of a plan for human spaceflight toward the Moon and Mars, and in an op-ed piece published in The New York Times, she highlighted the benefits of a deep-space-capable heavy launch vehicle for the robotic exploration of the Solar System. Porco has advocated for prioritizing the exploration of Enceladus over Europa.

Popular science articles by Porco have been published in The Sunday Times, Astronomy, the Arizona Daily Star, Sky & Telescope, American Scientist, and Scientific American. She is active in the presentation of science to the public as the leader of the Cassini Imaging Team, as the creator/editor of the website where Cassini images are posted. She writes the site's homepage "Captain's Log" greeting to the public. She is an atheist.

• Illustration — Porco (at right) re-enacting the famous Beatles photograph at Abbey Road with the other members of the Cassini Imaging Team. Porco is 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. She visited 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool, Paul McCartney's teenage home, after it opened as a Beatles Museum in 1995. The first color image released by Cassini to the public was an image of Jupiter, taken during Cassinis approach to the giant planet and released on October 9, 2000, to honor John Lennon's 60th birthday. In 2006, she produced and directed a brief 8-minute movie of 64 of Cassinis most spectacular images, put to the music of the Beatles, in honor of Paul McCartney's 64th birthday. And in 2007, she produced a poster showing 64 scenes from Saturn. Porco is also interested in dance and fascinated with Michael Jackson. In August 2010, she won a Michael Jackson costume/dance contest held in Boulder, Colorado. Quotes of Porco's were used in the production of "The Poetry of Reality (An Anthem for Science)", "A Wave of Reason", "Children of Africa (The Story of Us)", and "Onward to the Edge!" by Symphony of Science.