Carolyn Porco Quotations

We are at this very moment looking to see what the best times are for retargeting. Hopefully, we haven't seen the last of them.

While I was there, Voyager flew by Saturn. I got involved with a person who was a member of the imaging team and started working on data from Saturn, ... With all that data coming in, the imaging team didn't have enough hands or scientists to work on all of it.

We have at last glimpsed the surface of the fabled world, Titan, Saturn's largest moon and the greatest single expanse of unexplored territory remaining in the Solar System today,

Spokes are one of those Saturn-system phenomena that we are keenly interested in understanding.

For planetary explorers like us, there is little that can compare to the sighting of activity on another solar system body. This has been a heart-stopper, and surely one of our most thrilling results.

We had convinced ourselves that conditions wouldn't be right for seeing spokes on the lit side of the rings until about 2007, ... But this finding seems to be telling us that conditions on the dark side of the rings are almost as good right now for seeing spokes.

Saturn is the most photogenic planet in the solar system.

It's been an adventure just getting out to Saturn, .. Saturn is such an alluring photographic target. It's a joy, really, to be able to take our images and composite them in an artful way, which is one of my cardinal working goals. It's about poetry and beauty and science all mixed together.

Remember, Voyager was just a flyby, Cassini is in orbit. We have the opportunity for monitoring them and their behavior, their comings and goings, how they evolve, when they appear and disappear.

The quest for the truth, in and of itself, Is a story that's filled with insights.

Cassini is different -- it's a mission of enormous scope and is being conducted in grand style. It is much more sophisticated than Voyager, ... I can't say it's got that flavor of romance, though. Voyager was very romantic. Cassini is spectacular.

Nothing will ever be what the Voyager mission was,

The same spiritual fulfillment that people find in religion can be found in science by coming to know, if you will, the mind of God.

There is a powerful recognition that stirs within us when we see our little blue ocean planet in the skies of other worlds. In an instant we can see how small, fragile, and alone we all really are.

We humans, though troubled and warlike, are also the dreams, thinkers, and explorers inhabiting one achingly beautiful planet, yearning for the sublime, and capable of the magnificent.

Being a scientist and staring immensity and eternity in the face every day is as grand and inspiring as it gets,

Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome – and even comforting – than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.

All the atoms of our bodies will be blown into space in the disintegration of the solar system, to live on forever as mass or energy. That's what we should be teaching our children, not fairy tales about angels and seeing grandma in Heaven.

We have never seen anything like this before. There are spiral structures in the rings, there are gravity and density waves, but they are completely different things,

We acquired this spectacular, one-of-a-kind set of images immediately after getting into orbit for the express purpose of seeing fine details in the rings that we had not seen previously.

We're looking at some kind of focusing. We can't say why it would be at the south pole.

Since we hadn't ever seen the rings in this kind of detail, we were looking for phenomena we'd never seen before.

If we had done nothing else, these findings alone would have made the Cassini mission worthwhile.

If we're right, we've just hit the ball right out of the park.

I don't think you have to be a ring scientist to appreciate this. I'm blown away.

We realize that this is a radical conclusion -- that we may have evidence for liquid water within a body so small and so cold.

We realize that this is a radical conclusion. If we're right, we think we are looking at another environment in the solar system where we have liquid water and the potential for living organisms.

Well, in some sense we should have expected, if the recent models are correct, to see them on the dark side where the photoelectron abundance is low. So, I was surprised to see them. But once they showed up, I realized we should have expected them there all along.

We have the smoking gun that proves the existence of water.

We've been on the lookout for them since February, 2004. Spokes are one of those Saturn-system phenomena that we are keenly interested in understanding.

Enceladus is surprisingly warm, internally fractured and active ...

After what we've discovered with Cassini, if we don't get an extended mission, then there's no hope for anybody.

So, water closer to the surface and more time spent conducting scientific investigations....sounds like a winner to me.

So we think we have a Yellowstone-type liquid geyser tens of meters deep. We're fairly confident because we have exhausted all the other models.

Once you have liquid water, you have the potential for living organisms.

As far as I'm concerned, we just hit the ball out of the park. This is the Holy Grail of modern-day planetary exploration, evidence of liquid water somewhere else in the solar system.

This has been a heart-stopper, and surely one of our most thrilling results.

They flew through what turned out to be a plume.

Once the water comes out it freezes, and that produces copious amounts of ice particles.

It's not clear that Cassini has the means to determine if the ice crystals themselves contain microbes. It may require a device with much greater compositional precision than we have, so that may have to be left for a future mission.

I'll never forget when I realized there was this connection -- it was tremendous to know something that no one else on the planet knew,

However, if we are right, we have significantly broadened the diversity of solar system environments where we might possibly have conditions suitable for living organisms.