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Carolyn C. Porco, (born March 6, 1953), is an American astronomer, planetary scientist, imaging scientist, and science communicator who was in charge of the imaging team for the Cassini mission. She is an expert on planetary rings and Saturn's moon, Enceladus. Porco, a frequent public speaker, has received many awards and honors throughout her career, including the Isaac Asimov Science Award, and the Carl Sagan Medal. In 2012 she was named one of the 25 most influential people in space by Time Magazine.

Early life and education
Porco was born on March 6, 1953 in New York City to Italian immigrant parents, and grew up in Pelham Bay in The Bronx with her four brothers. She developed an interest in astronomy as a teenager after reading philosophy, studying Eastern religion and looking at the rings of Saturn through a friend's telescope. She graduated in 1970 from Cardinal Spellman High School. While a student at State University of New York at Stony Brook, she practiced Buddhist Chanting for two years. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Earth and Space Sciences from Stony Brook in 1974. She received her Ph.D. degree in Planetary Science and Astronomy in 1983 from the California Institute of Technology in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. Supervised by astrophysicist Peter Goldreich, she wrote her doctoral dissertation on Voyager 1 discoveries about the rings of Saturn.

Voyager 1 and 2
As a graduate student, Porco analyzed data sent by the spacecraft Voyager 1. Porco was the first person to describe the behavior of the eccentric ringlets and "spokes" discovered by Voyager 1 within the rings of Saturn, connecting them to Saturn's magnetic field. After obtaining her doctorate from Caltech in 1983, Porco joined the faculty of the Department of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona, where she stayed until 2003. She was recommended to be promoted to a full professor at the university by Carl Sagan. The recommendation letter has been archived by the Library of Congress. When she joined the faculty at the University of Arizona, Porco was invited to join the Voyager 2 camera team. She stayed with the project until the end of the mission in 1989.

Cassini
In 1990, at the age of 37, Porco was selected to lead the Cassini mission camera team by Dr. Wesley Huntress, the director, at the time, of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA headquarters. Her title was the Principal Investigator of the Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS). Porco's 14 member team built the most advanced space camera system of the time consisting of two camera telescopes. The cost of the mission was $3.4 billion. During the design phase, it became known by the public that the spacecraft would be nuclear powered and that it would not travel directly to Saturn but would travel a circuitous path that would bring it close to Earth two years after launch. Anti-nuclear groups began protesting the mission and Porco was asked to speak at a U.S. government House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics. Explaining the necessity of using nuclear power for so much instrumentation, she calmed fears by reassuring the subcommittee that over 50 engineers, scientists and risk analysts had calculated that even if there were an accident, people would receive less radiation than from a single dental X-ray. She continued educating the public about the nuclear issue by writing articles for newspapers and appearing on talk shows. Cassini was launched in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004. The spacecraft orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, taking more than 500,000 images. Porco regularly gave online reports of the Cassini mission and labeled them as Captain's Log, reminiscent of Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Moons
Cassini's cameras captured images of the shepherd moons Daphnis, Atlas and Pan. New images produced by Cassini showed the ridge around Pan was not as uniform as previously believed, supporting the idea that the ridge was formed from material falling from Saturn's rings onto its equator. Cassini cameras caught the moon Prometheus "stealing" material from Saturn's F-Ring. Geyser plumes of water vapor and ice crystals were discovered on the moon Enceladus, and found to be more active when the moon was furthest from Saturn. These geysers were determined to be evidence of an underground water supply, indicating life is possible there. Porco, Christopher McKay and other scientists hope to send a mission to Enceladus to test for life and study the geochemical processes further.

Rings
Cassini's images of Saturn's rings showed clumps, ripples, spiral patterns, sharp edges, scalloped edges, spikes and waves. Porco stated that the variation in patterns was connected to the interactions of the moons near to, or embedded, within the rings. In 1993, fellow astronomer Mark Marley and Porco theorized that Saturn's seismic activity could affect Saturn's rings and that the oscillations within the rings could be used to calculate how fast the planet spins. Cassini's images confirmed the idea. In 2010, the Cassini team was able to learn why there were irregularities on the outer edge of Saturn's B ring. They were found to be spontaneously caused due to the density and the edge of the ring rather than the effect of the moons. Porco stated, "We have found what we hoped we'd find when we set out on this journey with Cassini nearly 13 years ago: visibility into the mechanisms that have sculpted not only Saturn's rings, but celestial disks of a far grander scale, from solar systems, like our own, all the way to the giant spiral galaxies."

The Day the Earth Smiled
Porco initiated and planned The Day the Earth Smiled event which captured a picture of Saturn with the Earth in the distance on July 19, 2013, Porco had been involved with photographing the Earth from the outer solar system on two previous occasions, one being the Pale Blue Dot photo taken twenty-three years earlier. In 2013 it was the first time that the public had advanced notice of the photo. Porco invited people to look up, wave, and smile the moment the picture was taken.

Cassini's end
On September 15, 2017, Cassini was intentionally crashed into Saturn as it ran out of fuel. Porco stated that the break-up as it entered Saturn's atmosphere could be visible from earth, which would allow amateur astronomers to witness the spacecraft's destruction. In an interview on the CBC Radio show Quirks and Quarks, Porco expressed her mixed feelings about the end of the mission. While sad and sentimental, she was also proud of the mission's accomplishments and said, "...we are concluding the longest, the deepest, the most comprehensive scientific exploration of a remote planetary system that was ever undertaken."

Other scientific endeavors
Porco has co-authored more than 130 scientific papers. She was a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and was adjunct professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Porco, along with Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy, followed and studied Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 from March 25, 1993, until it crashed into Jupiter, 16 months later. Porco was an associate member of the New Horizons mission team to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. The spacecraft was launched in January, 2006 and reached Pluto in July, 2015, taking many images that changed scientists' understanding of the planet. She is currently a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

Science communication
Porco has written articles about science for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, 'London Sunday Times, Astronomy magazine, Sky and Telescope, Scientific American, American Scientist and the PBS and BBC websites. She has spoken twice for TED Talks, in 2007 in a talk titled This is Saturn and in 2009 in a talk titled Could a Saturn moon harbor life? She is the CEO of Diamond Sky Productions, a small company promoting scientific communication to the public through the artful use of planetary images and computer graphics.

Television and film
Porco was an advisor for the movie "Contact", a 1997 film based on the book by Carl Sagan, in which a young scientist, played by Jodie Foster, is looking for evidence of alien life. In the original script, Foster was to have an affair with her advisor. Porco advised against this since "Young, newly arrived female graduate students don't immediately fall into bed with their thesis advisers..." Sagan reportedly suggested that Foster use Porco as a real-life model to guide her performance. J.J. Abrams, after watching one of her TED Talks, asked Porco to be a consultant on planetary science and imagery for the film Star Trek. One scene, suggested by Porco, in which the spaceship Enterprise appeared through the clouds of Titan, was featured on the cover of the publication Cinefex, which features special effects in movies. Porco was featured in The Farthest-Voyager in Space, a 2017 PBS documentary on the Voyager program. Porco's voice was featured in several of the Symphony of Science videos, which also featured the voices of prominent science communicators such as Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Richard Dawkins.

Other
After geologist Eugene Shoemaker, who was one of her professors at Caltech, was killed in a car accident in 1997, Porco set about arranging to have his ashes sent to the moon. It had been Shoemaker's dream to go to the moon before he died. Porco designed and commissioned a laser-engraved composite picture of his work in brass foil, which was wrapped around a capsule of his cremated remains and was sent to the moon aboard the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in January, 1998. His were the first human remains to be placed on the moon. In 1999, she reviewed a biography called Carl Sagan: A Life by Keay Davidson for The Guardian.

Personal life
In a 2009 New York Times article, Porco lists Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey as her favorite movie.

Musical interests
Porco, who is a fan of The Beatles, owns a lot of their memorabilia and often references the group in her presentations and writings. In 2001, while in England, Porco and her team recreated the Beatle's Abbey Road album cover, crossing Abbey Road and having their photo taken. When the first, composite image of Jupiter was released to the public on October 9, 2000, the Cassini Imaging Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS) blog wished John Lennon a happy 60th birthday. On June 18, 2006, on Paul McCartney's 64th birthday, Porco produced and directed a movie that showcased 64 of Cassini's pictures with parts of 24 Beatle's songs used for the soundtrack. The songs later had to be removed due to copyright issues. Porco has been a member of two bands in which she played guitar and sang: The Titan Equatorial Band, made up of scientists and science writers and The Estrogens, made up of three women and one man. Porco won a Michael Jackson dance and costume contest that was held in Boulder Colorado.

Awards

 * 2008: Isaac Asimov Science Award from the American Humanist Association.
 * 2009: Huntington Library's Science Writer Fellowship for 2010.
 * 2009: Lennart Nilsson Award, along with Babak Amin Tafreshi in recognition of their photographic work.


 * 2010: Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in the Communication of Science to the Public.
 * 2011: Distinguished Alumni Award from the California Institute of Technology, the highest honor regularly bestowed by Caltech.
 * 2018: Eliza Scidmore Award from the National Geographic Society.

Honors

 * 1998: asteroid named: 7231 Porco
 * 1999: selected by The Sunday Times (London) as one of 18 scientific leaders of the 21st century.
 * 2004: selected by Industry Week as one of 50 Stars to Watch.
 * 2008: selected by Wired magazine's inaugural 'Smart List: 15 People the Next President Should Listen To.'
 * 2009: received an Honorary D.Sc. degree in May from Stony Brook University of which she is an alumna.
 * 2009: New Statesman named her as one of 'The 50 People Who Matter Today.'
 * 2012: Time magazine named her one of the 25 most influential people in space.