41 Facts About Carolyn Porco

Carolyn C Porco was born on March 6,1953 and 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.

Carolyn Porco led the imaging science team on the Cassini mission in orbit around Saturn.

Carolyn Porco is an expert on planetary rings and the Saturnian moon, Enceladus.

Carolyn Porco was 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.

Carolyn Porco has 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, Carolyn Porco was awarded the Carl Sagan Medal, presented by the American Astronomical Society for Excellence in the Communication of Science to the Public.

Carolyn Porco graduated in 1970 from Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx, New York City.

Carolyn 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, discovered by Voyager.

Carolyn Porco 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.

In November 1990, Carolyn 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.

Carolyn Porco is the Director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations, 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.

Carolyn 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.

Carolyn Porco's team was responsible for the first sighting of plumes erupting from Enceladus, Saturn's sixth largest moon.

Carolyn Porco was a member of the imaging team for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt through 2014.

Carolyn Porco served in the faculty of the University of Arizona from 1983 to 2001, achieving tenured professorship in 1991.

Carolyn Porco 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.

Carolyn 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.

Carolyn 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.

Carolyn Porco speaks frequently on the Cassini mission and planetary exploration in general, and has appeared at renowned conferences such as PopTech 2005 and TED.

Carolyn Porco attended and was a speaker at the Beyond Belief symposium in November 2006.

Carolyn 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 describing the environment of Titan, with its molecular nitrogen atmosphere suffused with organic compounds, Carolyn Porco invited her audience to imagine the scene on the moon's surface:.

Carolyn Porco was a speaker at the 2016 Reason Rally.

Carolyn Porco served as an adviser for the 1997 film Contact, which was based on the 1987 novel of the same name by the well-known astronomer Carl Sagan.

Carolyn Porco was a guest on the BBC's Stargazing Live Series 4 in January 2014.

Carolyn Porco appeared in The Farthest, a 2017 documentary on the Voyager program.

Carolyn Porco has given numerous interviews in print media on subjects ranging from planetary exploration to the conflict between science and religion.

Carolyn Porco has been profiled many times in print, beginning in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, the Tucson Citizen, Newsday, for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, in Astronomy Now, in Discover Magazine, and online on CNN.

Carolyn Porco 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.

Carolyn Porco has advocated for prioritizing the exploration of Enceladus over Europa.

Carolyn Porco writes the site's homepage "Captain's Log" greeting to the public.

In 1999, Carolyn Porco was selected by The Sunday Times as one of 18 scientific leaders of the 21st century, and by Industry Week as one of 50 Stars to Watch.

In 2008, Carolyn Porco was awarded the Isaac Asimov Science Award by the American Humanist Association.

In September 2009, Carolyn Porco was awarded The Huntington Library's Science Writer Fellowship for 2010.

Carolyn Porco combines the finest techniques of planetary exploration and scientific research with aesthetic finesse and educational talent.

In October 2010, Carolyn Porco was awarded the 2010 Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in the Communication of Science to the Public, presented by the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences.

In 2012, Carolyn Porco was named one of the 25 most influential people in space by Time magazine.

Carolyn Porco received the Sikkens Prize for her "exceptional contribution to a realistic and colourful image of the universe" in 2020, which was presented on October 2,2022.

Carolyn 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.

Carolyn Porco visited 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool, Paul McCartney's teenage home, after it opened as a Beatles Museum in 1995.

Carolyn Porco is interested in dance and fascinated with Michael Jackson.