Carolyn Porco

Carolyn Porco is the leader of the imaging science team on the Cassini mission presently in orbit around Saturn, a veteran imaging scientist of the Voyager mission to the outer solar system in the 1980s, and an imaging scientist on the New Horizons mission on its way to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. In late 1999, she was selected by the London Sunday Times as one of 18 scientific leaders of the 21st century, and by Industrial Week as one of "50 Stars to Watch". Her contributions to the exploration of the outer solar system were recognized with the naming of Asteroid (7231) Porco: "Named in honor of Carolyn C. Porco, a pioneer in the study of planetary ring systems...and a leader in spacecraft exploration of the outer solar system". In 2008, she was awarded the Isaac Asimov Science Award by the American Humanist Association. She opened the May 10, 2008 worldwide multi-media event known as Pangea Day with a speech illustrating humanity's cosmic place.

Porco was a co-originator of the idea, with renowned astronomer Carl Sagan, to take a 'Portrait of the Planets' with the Voyager spacecraft, and participated in the planning, design, and execution of those images in 1990, including the famous Pale Blue Dot image of Earth. She was responsible for the proposal to honor the late renowned planetary geologist, Eugene Shoemaker, by sending his cremains, and an epitaph, to the Moon aboard the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1998.

Porco served as an adviser for the 1997 film "Contact", which was based on a novel by Sagan. In 2008, she was invited by J. J. Abrams, the director/producer of the new Star Trek film, to join the Star Trek production crew as a consultant on science and planetary imagery.

Porco has co-authored over 100 scientific papers on subjects ranging from planetary spectroscopy, 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, the Saturnian moon Enceladus, and a suite of results since 2004 on the atmosphere, satellites, and rings of Saturn from the Cassini imaging experiment.

She has been a regular CNN guest analyst and consultant on astronomy, has made many radio and television appearances explaining science to the layman, including appearances on the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, CBS' "60 Minutes", Peter Jennings' "The Century", and TV documentaries on planetary exploration such as "Cosmic Journey: The Voyager Interstellar Mission and Message" on A&E, "The Planets" on the Discovery Channel and the BBC, Horizon on the BBC, and many television specials on Cassini.

She has also given scores of newspaper and magazine interviews on subjects ranging from planetary exploration to the conflict between science and religion (e.g., Newsweek and the New York Times), and has been profiled many times in print, beginning in 1989 in the Boston Globe (October, 1989) in the New York Times (August, 1999), in the Tucson Citizen (2001) , in Newsday (June 2004), for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (in 2006), and in Astronomy Now (2006), and online on CNN.com (2005), on the Edge.org, on the Facts.com, and Space.com. She speaks frequently on the Cassini mission and planetary exploration in general, and has appeared recently at such cross-disciplinary conferences as Poptech (2005, 2006) and TED (2007) and TED (2009) . She was a participant in a panel discussion at the Aspen Ideas Festival on "Science and the Public Sphere".

Her popular science writings have been published in the London Sunday Times, the Guardian, Astronomy Magazine, the Arizona Daily Star, Sky and Telescope, American Scientist and Scientific American. She is a regular contributor to Edge.org, an on-line salon for the discussion of philosophical, scientific, artistic, and literary issues. She continues to be active in the presentation of science to the public as the leader of the Cassini Imaging Team. She is the creator/editor of the team's CICLOPS website where Cassini images are posted, and writes the site's homepage "Captain's Log" greeting to the public.