Carolyn Porco

“The book that blew the doors off the house, grabbing me with its breathtakingly deep and irresistible view of the universe and our relation to it, was 'Intelligent Life in the Universe' by I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan. I recall an enchanting all-nighter completing a college homework assignment to read the first chapter.”

“Titan has no liquid water on its surface, and any liquid water beneath its surface is inaccessible to us, as far as we know. It has hydrocarbon lakes, but we don't know of any organisms that could live in those, not at the temperatures that we find on Titan. Any reference to possible life in lakes on the surface of Titan is pure speculation.”

“We can have fun speculating about why things are the way they are but don't look to science to provide any answers.”

“It's always snowing at the south pole of Enceladus.”

“My work is my life.”

“I'm used to fighting and arguing with males.”

“Most of the solar system resides beyond the orbits of the asteroids. There is more to learn there about general planetary processes than on Mars.”

“Even if the ocean on Enceladus starts out being as microbially poor as the pelagic ocean on Earth, which is the worst case, we still have a chance of seeing lots of organisms in the plumes.”

“No matter how you measure it, whether you measure the amount of mass or you measure the number of bodies, most of our solar system exists out beyond the orbits of the asteroids. So we could not have claimed to know our own solar system until Voyager had toured the giant planets.”

“It's so empowering to know the truth and to really understand something.”

“Scientists tend to come in two stripes: those who have tremendous appetite and aptitude for the details, and those who illuminate the big picture. Sagan was definitely in the latter category, and he was profoundly good at it. He made connections that others did not have the intellectual breadth or courage to make.”

“Cassini was an international undertaking, led by NASA and the European Space Agency and designed to be, in every dimension, a dramatic advance over Voyager. At the size of a school bus, it was bigger than Voyager and outfitted with the most sophisticated scientific instruments ever carried into the outer solar system.”

“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.”

“As far as Europa goes, Europa very likely has an ocean under its surface. In that regard, Europa and Enceladus are on equal par. But on Europa, the ocean is at least several kilometers under the surface, and the moon is bathed in an intense radiation field.”

“Voyager found Saturn to be a planet with a complex interior, atmosphere, and magnetosphere. In its rings - a vast, gleaming disk of icy rubble - the mission recorded signs of the same physical mechanisms that were key in configuring the early solar system and similar disks of material around other stars.”

“I did play the guitar and sing; I was in a band called The Estrogens: three females and one very brave guy.”

“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.”

“The Cassini mission was all about a comprehensive investigation of Saturn and everything in the Saturn system, and it's been a mission that's been done jointly with the Europeans.”

“I got into astronomy through an interest in religion.”

“Every type of ring behavior we have seen around Jupiter, Uranus, or Neptune can be found in orbit around Saturn. And Saturn's ring system offers the greatest promise of understanding processes in operation within all disk systems, not just those found around planets.”