Carolyn Porco Quotes

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Carolyn Porco

Profession : Scientist

Birth : March 6, 1953

I am uneasy about having scientific exploration depend on profit-making companies.

Carolyn Porco

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.

Carolyn Porco

Those of us engaged in the practice of science come to feel a certain reverence for it, engendered by its demonstrable power to dissect, clarify, and explain what previously was unexplainable, and thus to improve the human condition.

Carolyn Porco

I'm used to fighting and arguing with males.

Carolyn Porco

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.

Carolyn Porco

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.

Carolyn Porco

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.

Carolyn Porco

Make education more accessible to women - all women, not just Americans.

Carolyn Porco

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.

Carolyn Porco

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.

Carolyn Porco

The most exciting thing that we have found with Cassini is the geological activity, the geysering activity at the south pole of Enceladus.

Carolyn Porco

The book that blew the doors off the house, grabbing me with its breathtakingly deep and irresistible view of the universe and our relation to it, was 'Intelligent Life in the Universe' by I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan. I recall an enchanting all-nighter completing a college homework assignment to read the first chapter.

Carolyn Porco

Between my participation in Voyager and my role in Cassini, when comes the time, I will die a happy and gratified woman.

Carolyn Porco

There's nothing in this world like being the first to discover some fundamental fact of nature. It's profoundly satisfying.

Carolyn Porco

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.

Carolyn Porco

Science is not the means by which we come to understand why physical laws and circumstances are the way they are. When we ask why - assuming the question is really 'why' and not 'how' - we are really asking to know the motive of some responsible agent capable of reason.

Carolyn Porco

Voyager's passage through Saturn's inner system exposed diverse moons with dynamic forces at work. Titan, Saturn's largest moon, whose surface remained invisible through its thick, ubiquitous haze, nonetheless teased observers with hints of a possible ocean of liquid hydrocarbons.

Carolyn Porco

It's so empowering to know the truth and to really understand something.

Carolyn Porco

The Huygens images were everything our images from orbit were not. Instead of hazy, sinuous features that we could only guess were streams and drainage channels, here was incontrovertible evidence that at some point in Titan's history - and perhaps even now - there were flowing liquid hydrocarbons on the surface.

Carolyn Porco