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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carolyn Porco | 1/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Porco | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T13:28:01.532694+00:00 | kb-cron |
Carolyn C. Porco (born March 6, 1953) is an American planetary scientist who explores the outer Solar System, beginning with her imaging work on the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s. She led the imaging science team on the Cassini mission in orbit around Saturn. She is an expert on planetary rings and the Saturnian moon, Enceladus. 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.
== Early life and education == 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.
== Career ==
=== Voyager === 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.
=== Cassini–Huygens ===
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.
=== New Horizons === 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.
=== The Day the Earth Smiled ===