Carolyn Porco

“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...”

“Titan is the one place in our solar system whose geographical and atmospheric diversity and complexity are rivaled only by the Earth's. It's very Earth-like, but it's also very different, wh...”

“When the Voyager 2 spacecraft sped through the Saturnian system more than a quarter of a century ago, it came within 90,000 kilometers of the moon Enceladus. Over the course of a few hours,...”

“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 physic...”

“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 process...”

“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 ev...”

“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...”

“To my mind, most people go through life recoiling from its best parts. They miss the enrichment that just a basic knowledge of the physical world can bring to the most ordinary experiences.”

“Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and, until Cassini had arrived, there was the largest single expanse of unexplored terrain that we had remaining in our solar system.”

“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...”

“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 chemistr...”

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

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

“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, ubiquitou...”

“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...”

“Titan has no liquid water on its surface, and any liquid water beneath its surface is inaccessible to us, as far as we know. It has hydrocarbon lakes, but we don't know of any organisms that...”

“The first real Cassini image that brought tears to my eyes was an image of Jupiter. I didn't expect it to look so detailed.”

“Saturn is such an alluring photographic target.”

“It's like there's a pulsating, hidden world, governed by ancient laws and principles, underlying everything around us - from the movements of electrical charges to the motions of the planets...”

“The Saturn system is a rich planetary system. It offers mystery, scientific insight, and obviously splendour beyond compare, and the investigation of this system has enormous cosmic reach......”