Carolyn Porco Quotes (20 Quotes)

Saturn is the most photogenic planet in the solar system.

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

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.

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,

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

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

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.

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.

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,

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.

Of intense interest will be a Cassini determination of the periodicity in the appearance of spokes. This will require monitoring spoke activity from a variety of geometries over several years. Cassini has found that the SKR period has changed since Voyager, which though hard to believe, may mean that the rotation of Saturn's interior has changed, ... That would be a finding of enormous consequence, so, we'll be looking very closely to see if the frequency of spoke activity has changed too.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

These are among the things we hope to learn. The spokes are obviously related to a host of processesand may point to some important effects in understanding the magnetic field and the planet's magnetosphere, and how these systems interact with the rings and atmosphere.

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.

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