Carolyn Porco

Born on 6 March 1953 in New York City, Carolyn Porco is a planetary scientist who is responsible for many of the discoveries and stunning images from the Voyager and Cassini missions. Porco earned her PhD from Caltech in 1983. She then joined the faculty of the University of Arizona planetary sciences department, where she worked until 2003, when she became a senior researcher at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. While still a graduate student, Porco analyzed data on Saturn’s ring system sent by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, making several significant discoveries about the planet’s ringlets and its magnetic field. After being made an official member of the Voyager imaging team, Porco went on in 1990 to become imaging team leader for the Cassini mission, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017. The spacecraft took almost 500 000 images, from which Porco and her fellow team members were able to make a number of important findings, including the venting of water ice on the moon Enceladus. Porco also serves as an associate member of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Over her career Porco has participated in producing some of the most iconic photos of space, such as the Pale Blue Dot image of Earth taken by Voyager 1. She has also become a regular public commentator on science, astronomy, and planetary exploration and served as a science consultant on such productions as the 1997 movie Contact (based on the novel by fellow astronomer Carl Sagan), the 2009 movie Star Trek, and the 2017 documentary The Farthest: Voyager in Space. In 2010 she was awarded the Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in Public Communication in Planetary Science. And in 2012, she was named one the 25 most influential people in space by Time magazine. Since 2015 Porco has been a visiting distinguished scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. (Photo credit: Elliot Severn, CC BY-SA 3.0 )

Date in History: 6 March 1953