Carolyn Porco

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Carolyn Porco (born March 6, 1953 in New York City) is an American planetary scientist and the leader of the imaging science team on the Cassini mission[1][2][3] presently in orbit around Saturn. In 1999, she was selected by The London Sunday Times as one of 18 scientific leaders of the 21st century[4], and by Industrial Week as one of 50 Stars to Watch.[5] Porco was responsible for the epitaph and proposal to honor the late renowned planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker by sending his cremains to the Moon aboard the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1998.[6][7] Her contributions to the exploration of the outer solar system were recognized with the naming of Asteroid (7231) Porco which is "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"[citation needed]. She was awarded the Isaac Asimov Science Award in 2008 by the American Humanist Association.[8]. She gave the opening speech[9] for Pangea Day, a global broadcast coordinated from 6 cities around the world that took place on May 10, 2008, in which she described the cosmic context for human existence.

Porco was an imaging scientist on the Voyager mission in the 1980s, and is also an imaging scientist on the New Horizons[10] mission launched to Pluto on January 19, 2006. She is an expert on planetary rings and the Saturnian moon, Enceladus. As a young Voyager scientist, she 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, also discovered by Voyager. She was a co-originator of the idea to take a 'portrait of the planets' with the Voyager spacecraft, and participated in the planning, design, and execution of those images in 1991, including the famous Pale Blue Dot image of Earth.[11]

She has co-authored over 80 scientific papers on subjects ranging from the spectroscopy of Uranus and Neptune, 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, and a suite of results on the atmosphere, satellites, and rings of Saturn from the Cassini imaging experiment.[12] She and her team discovered five moons around Saturn: Methone, Pallene, Polydeuces, Daphnis, and Anthe.[13][14][15][16][17][18] They also have found several new rings, such as rings coincident with the orbits of Atlas, Janus and Epimetheus (the Saturnian 'co-orbitals') and Pallene, a diffuse ring between Atlas and the F ring, and new rings within several of the gaps in Saturn's rings. Recently, she has turned her scientific investigations to the study of Enceladus and its now-famous jets. She and her team first suggested, and provided detailed scientific arguments, that these jets might be geysers erupting from reservoirs of near-surface liquid water under the south pole of the small moon.[19] They also sighted what looked like a hydrocarbon lake in the southern hemisphere of Titan in June 2005,[20] and a group of similar (and larger) features in the northern hemisphere in February 2007. The possibility that these sea-sized features are either completely or partially filled with liquid hydrocarbons is significantly strengthened by overlapping Cassini radar data[21][22]

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[edit] Career

Porco received her Ph.D. degree in 1983 from the California Institute of Technology in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. Her doctoral dissertation focused on Voyager discoveries in the rings of Saturn and was supervised by renowned dynamicist Peter Goldreich. In the fall of 1983, she joined the faculty in the Department of Planetary Sciences within the University of Arizona; the same year she was made a member of the Voyager Imaging Team. In the latter capacity, she was an active participant in the Voyager encounters with Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989, leading the Rings Working Group within the Voyager Imaging Team during the Neptune encounter.

In November 1990, she was selected as the leader of the Imaging Team for the Cassini-Huygens mission[1][2],,[3] an international mission that successfully placed a spacecraft in orbit around Saturn and deployed the atmospheric Huygens probe to Saturn's largest satellite, Titan. She is also the Director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS (CICLOPS), which is 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.[23] CICLOPS is part of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

As a tenured faculty member at the University of Arizona, she has taught both graduates and undergraduates and was one of 5 finalists for the University of Arizona Honors Center Five Star Faculty Award, a campus-wide student-nominated, student-judged award for outstanding undergraduate teaching. Porco is currently a Senior Research Scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

She 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. In the mid-1990’s, she served as the chairperson for a small NASA advisory working group to study and develop future outer solar system missions and she served as the Vice Chairperson of the Steering Group for the Solar System Decadal Survey, sponsored by NASA and the National Academy of Sciences.

She speaks frequently on the Cassini mission and planetary exploration in general, and has appeared recently at renowned conferences such as Pop!Tech (2005, 2006)[citation needed] and TED (2007)[citation needed]. She attended and was a speaker at the Beyond Belief symposium on November 2006[citation needed].

[edit] TV and film

Porco 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 a Nova Cassini special on PBS. Porco served as an adviser for the 1997 film Contact, which was based on a novel by the well-known astronomer Carl Sagan. The actress Jodie Foster portrayed the heroine in the movie, and Sagan reportedly suggested that she use Porco as a real-life model to guide her performance.[24] Porco is also an advisor on the film Star Trek (2009).[25]

[edit] Interviews and articles

She has also given many newspaper and magazine interviews on subjects ranging from planetary exploration to the conflict between science and religion (e.g. Newsweek[26][27] and The New York Times[citation needed]), and has been profiled many times in print, beginning in the Boston Globe (October 1989)[citation needed], the New York Times (August 1999),[28] the Tucson Citizen (2001),[29] in Newsday (June 2004)[citation needed], for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (2006)[30] and in Astronomy Now (2006),[31] and also online on CNN.com (2005)[citation needed], on Edge.org,[32] on Facts.com[24] and on Space.com.[33] Prior to Cassini’s launch, she was a strong and visible defendant of the usage of radioactive materials on the Cassini spacecraft[citation needed]. She is a supporter of the re-direction of NASA’s humanflight program towards the Moon and Mars, and in an op-ed piece published in The New York Times,[34] highlighted the benefits of the new direction for the robotic exploration of the solar system.

[edit] Popular science

In 1994, Porco was a member of a committee (chaired by Carl Sagan) entitled Public Communication of NASA's Science, and in 1999, she reviewed a biography of Sagan for The Guardian.[35] Her popular science articles have been published in The London Sunday Times, The Guardian, Astronomy, the Arizona Daily Star, Sky & Telescope and American Scientist. She continues to be active in the presentation of science to the public as the leader of the Cassini Imaging Team, where she is the creator/editor of the website where Cassini images are posted, and writes the site's homepage "Captain's Log" greeting to the public.[23]

She is also the CEO of Diamond Sky Productions, a small company devoted to the scientific, as well as artful, use of planetary images and computer graphics for the presentation of science to the public.

[edit] Music

Carolyn (at right) re-enacting the famous Beatles photograph at Abbey Road with the other members of the Cassini Imaging Team.
Carolyn (at right) re-enacting the famous Beatles photograph at Abbey Road with the other members of the Cassini Imaging Team.

Porco is famously 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. The first color image released by Cassini to the public was an image of Jupiter, taken during Cassini’s approach to the giant planet and released on October 9, 2000 to honor John Lennon’s 60th birthday.[36] In 2006, she produced and directed a brief 8-minute movie of 64 of Cassini’s most spectacular images,[37] put to the music of the Beatles, in honor of Paul McCartney’s 64th birthday. And in 2007, she produced a poster showing sixty-four scenes from Saturn, which she sent to the former Beatle, Paul McCartney.[38][39]

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Cassini-Huygens: Mission to Saturn & Titan
  2. ^ a b Cassini-Huygens: Close Encounter with Saturn
  3. ^ a b Cassini-Huygens
  4. ^ Farrer, Steve. "The brains behind the 21st century", News Review, The Sunday Times, January 10, 1999, p. 6. 
  5. ^ Industrial Week, 1999 "50 R&D Stars To Watch"
  6. ^ Astronomy, February 2000 "Destination Moon"
  7. ^ Eugene M. Shoemaker: A Tribute
  8. ^ Humanists to Honor Lead Imaging Scientist on the Cassini Saturn Project
  9. ^ Introduction to Pangea Day
  10. ^ New Horizons: NASA's Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission
  11. ^ C. Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997)
  12. ^ Cassini Imaging Team Scientific Publications
  13. ^ C.C. Porco, et al., IAUC 8389 - discovery of S/2004 S 1 (Methone) and S/2004 S 2 (Pallene)
  14. ^ C.C. Porco, et al., IAUC 8432 - discovery of S/2004 S 5 (Polydeuces) (November 8, 2004)
  15. ^ IAUC 8471 - naming of Methone and Pallene (January 21, 2005)
  16. ^ IAUC 8471 - naming of Polydeuces (January 21, 2005)
  17. ^ C.C. Porco et al., IAUC 8524: discovery of S/2005 S 1 (Daphnis)
  18. ^ C. C. Porco et al. "Cassini Imaging Science: Initial Results on Saturn's Rings and Small Satellites". Science, vol. 307, no. 5713, pp. 1226-1236
  19. ^ C. C. Porco, et al. "Cassini Observes the Active South Pole of Enceladus", Science, vol. 311, no. 5766, 2006, pp. 1393-1401
  20. ^ Land of Lakes?
  21. ^ Exploring the Wetlands of Titan
  22. ^ Meet Carolyn Porco, the Scientist Who Made Saturn a Rock Star
  23. ^ a b CICLOPS
  24. ^ a b Carolyn Porco: Captain's Log, July 2015
  25. ^ Lead Planetary Scientist to Advise on New Star Trek Movie
  26. ^ Losing Our Religion
  27. ^ The New Naysayers
  28. ^ Carolyn Porco: Cassini Scientist Yielded to the Seduction of Space
  29. ^ Carolyn Porco profile in the Tucson Citizen
  30. ^ Dr. Carolyn Porco: The Biggest, Baddest Team Leader
  31. ^ Carolyn Porco: the biggest, baddest team leader of them all
  32. ^ Carolyn Porco profile on the Edge.org website
  33. ^ Carolyn Porco: Keeping an Eye in Saturn
  34. ^ NASA Goes Deep
  35. ^ Book Review: Carl Sagan: A Life
  36. ^ Jupiter & Europa in True Color
  37. ^ Sixty-Four Scenes from Saturn ... The Movie
  38. ^ Sixty-Four Scenes from Saturn ... The Poster
  39. ^ Sixty-Four Scenes from Saturn ... The Images

[edit] External links

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