Words matter. These are the best Carolyn Porco Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Even if the ocean on Enceladus starts out being as microbially poor as the pelagic ocean on Earth, which is the worst case, we still have a chance of seeing lots of organisms in the plumes.
My work is my life.
People gravitate to religion to feel a connection to the underlying meaning of everything. Well, as a scientist, you’re always looking for the underlying meaning, and that, to me, is such a spiritual life, I wish people would open themselves up to that wonder.
Whenever we humans think that we might be approaching something that is vaguely similar to Earth, we get very excited about it. The prospect of something familiar but yet so distant and so strange is a very exciting combination.
Cassini was an international undertaking, led by NASA and the European Space Agency and designed to be, in every dimension, a dramatic advance over Voyager. At the size of a school bus, it was bigger than Voyager and outfitted with the most sophisticated scientific instruments ever carried into the outer solar system.
My whole entry into astronomy started from a spiritual place.
Make education more accessible to women – all women, not just Americans.
The Cassini mission was all about a comprehensive investigation of Saturn and everything in the Saturn system, and it’s been a mission that’s been done jointly with the Europeans.
Saturn is accompanied by a very large and diverse collection of moons. They range in size from a few kilometers across to as big across as the U.S.
For me, it was my first cosmic connection, on par with a first kiss. No other planet looks as unworldly or surreal as Saturn. When you see it floating in the eyepiece of your telescope, you feel as if you’ve uncovered mystery in the cosmos.
Titan is Saturn’s largest moon, and, until Cassini had arrived, there was the largest single expanse of unexplored terrain that we had remaining in our solar system.
‘Carl Sagan: A Life,’ though a riveting tale, tells as much about the all-too-human feelings of jealousy and resentment as it does about the individual who inspired them.
When the Voyager 2 spacecraft sped through the Saturnian system more than a quarter of a century ago, it came within 90,000 kilometers of the moon Enceladus. Over the course of a few hours, its cameras returned a handful of images that confounded planetary scientists for years.
Saturn is such an alluring photographic target.
Saturn itself is a giant planet, and there’s much to be gained by investigating its meteorology and studying its magnetic field.
There’s nothing in this world like being the first to discover some fundamental fact of nature. It’s profoundly satisfying.
I did play the guitar and sing; I was in a band called The Estrogens: three females and one very brave guy.
The first real Cassini image that brought tears to my eyes was an image of Jupiter. I didn’t expect it to look so detailed.
Boy, when you come to study something, and you come to understand it – you know, even if it’s just a little discovery that you make, and you come to understand it on your own, it feels it’s like the greatest high. It’s like you just have found some incredibly secretive thing about nature.
It’s always snowing at the south pole of Enceladus.
To my mind, most people go through life recoiling from its best parts. They miss the enrichment that just a basic knowledge of the physical world can bring to the most ordinary experiences.
Scientists tend to come in two stripes: those who have tremendous appetite and aptitude for the details, and those who illuminate the big picture. Sagan was definitely in the latter category, and he was profoundly good at it. He made connections that others did not have the intellectual breadth or courage to make.
I got into astronomy through an interest in religion.
The need for a detailed, comprehensive examination of the Saturn system became clear during the early 1980s, after the two Voyager spacecraft made flybys of the planet. These celebrated events were the opening acts in the story of humanity’s exploration of Saturn.
The reasons why images are so primal and people immediately relate to it is that we are exquisitely engineered to interpret information that is arrayed in two dimensions. That’s our eyesight. That’s how our eye-brain system works. So it immediately feels to us when we look at an image like we have extended our senses.
I was drawn to astronomy by a teenage existential quest. Around 13, I was deep into wondering about the meaning of life and what I was doing here. I turned to religion, but that did nothing for me. I got to wondering where was here. So, I began studying astronomy and became enthralled by what I learned.
In any ‘big science’ enterprise, like planetary exploration, where you must work in big teams of similarly driven people, it is important also to know how to work alongside others even when they may be your fiercest competitors.
The most exciting thing that we have found with Cassini is the geological activity, the geysering activity at the south pole of Enceladus.
I have a bias, and I don’t deny that. But it’s not so much an emotional attachment with objects that we study: it’s a point of view based on the evidence. We simply know more about Enceladus.
As far as Europa goes, Europa very likely has an ocean under its surface. In that regard, Europa and Enceladus are on equal par. But on Europa, the ocean is at least several kilometers under the surface, and the moon is bathed in an intense radiation field.
No matter how you measure it, whether you measure the amount of mass or you measure the number of bodies, most of our solar system exists out beyond the orbits of the asteroids. So we could not have claimed to know our own solar system until Voyager had toured the giant planets.
As far as I’m concerned, Enceladus has become the go-to place in our solar system for issues bearing on extraterrestrial life. It’s a great place to examine extraterrestrial organic chemistry that is water-based and, therefore, like biotic chemistry on Earth.
I’m used to fighting and arguing with males.
I am uneasy about having scientific exploration depend on profit-making companies.
Voyager found Saturn to be a planet with a complex interior, atmosphere, and magnetosphere. In its rings – a vast, gleaming disk of icy rubble – the mission recorded signs of the same physical mechanisms that were key in configuring the early solar system and similar disks of material around other stars.
