Carolyn Porco Quotes Quotes

'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.
As a planetary system, Saturn holds the greatest promise for answering questions that have a far broader scientific reach than Saturn itself.
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.
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.
Between my participation in Voyager and my role in Cassini, when comes the time, I will die a happy and gratified woman.
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.
By the time I finished high school, I knew I wanted to become an astronomer. By the time I finished college, I knew I wanted to be part of the American space program. And that's exactly what I did.
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.
Cassini was so profoundly, scientifically successful. It's amazing to me, even, what we were able to do right up until the end.
Even by the diverse standards of Saturn's satellites, Enceladus was an outlier. Its icy surface was as white and bright as fresh snow, and whereas the other airless moons were heavily pocked with craters, Enceladus was mantled in places with extensive plains of smooth, uncratered terrain, a clear sign of past internally driven geologic activity.
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.
Every type of ring behavior we have seen around Jupiter, Uranus, or Neptune can be found in orbit around Saturn. And Saturn's ring system offers the greatest promise of understanding processes in operation within all disk systems, not just those found around planets.
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.
I am uneasy about having scientific exploration depend on profit-making companies.
I did play the guitar and sing; I was in a band called The Estrogens: three females and one very brave guy.
I got into astronomy through an interest in religion.
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.
I know that I derive the same kind of spiritual fulfillment from what I do, being a planetary scientist, seeing our exploration of the solar system come to fruition. I get such a spiritual high from it that I don't even see the need for religion.
I read about eastern philosophy and religion and existentialism. All that introspective thinking got me thinking about the great beyond. That turned my sights from inwards to outwards, and I started becoming interested in the makeup of the universe, and I started reading about astronomy, planets, and galaxies.
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.
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AuthorName
Carolyn Porco
Profession
Scientist
BirthDate
06 March, 1953
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