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.

Carolyn Porco

Categorized in : Adventure Joy Goal

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.

Carolyn Porco

grandma teaching children

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.

Carolyn Porco

god beauty children

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

Carolyn Porco

scientist eternity faces

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.

Carolyn Porco

sublime dream beautiful

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.

Carolyn Porco

spiritual mind people

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.

Carolyn Porco

other-worlds powerful ocean

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.

Carolyn Porco

romance style different

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.

Carolyn Porco

spokes dark sides

The quest for the truth, in and of itself,

Carolyn Porco

quests insight stories

Nothing will ever be what the Voyager mission was.

Carolyn Porco

missions

Saturn is the most photogenic planet in the solar system.

Carolyn Porco

solar-system saturn planets

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.

Carolyn Porco

data team hands

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.

Carolyn Porco

body heart littles

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.

Carolyn Porco

orbit opportunity remember

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

Carolyn Porco

spokes saturn understanding

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.

Carolyn Porco

territory moon world

For me, it was my first cosmic connection, on par with a first kiss. No other planet looks as unworldly or surreal as Saturn. When you see it floating in the eyepiece of your telescope, you feel as if you've uncovered mystery in the cosmos.

Carolyn Porco

kiss feel me you

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... just studying the rings alone, we stand to learn a lot about the discs of stars and gas that we call the spiral galaxies.

Carolyn Porco

alone rich mystery stars

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 chemistry that is water-based and, therefore, like biotic chemistry on Earth.

Carolyn Porco

place great chemistry life

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.

Carolyn Porco

eyes look tears real