Dr. Carolyn C. Porco

Dr. Carolyn C. Porco received her PhD degree in 1983 from the California Institute of Technology in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, having completed her doctoral dissertation on Voyager discoveries in the rings of Saturn. In the fall of 1983, she joined the faculty in the Department of Planetary Sciences within the University of Arizona; the same year she was made a member of the Voyager Imaging Team. In the latter capacity, she participated heavily in the Voyager encounters with Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989, leading the Rings Working Group within the Voyager Imaging Team during the latter encounter. In November 1990, she was selected as the leader of the Imaging Team for the Cassini mission to Saturn, an international mission to place a spacecraft in orbit around Saturn, and deploy an atmospheric probe to Saturn's largest satellite, Titan, in the year 2004. She is also the team leader for the Imaging Science experiment on the recently-selected Pluto/Kuiper Belt mission called New Horizons, which will launch to Pluto in 2006.

She is currently Director of Flight Operations/CICLOPS at Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She has taught both graduates and undergraduates and was one of 5 finalists for the University of Arizona Honors Center `Five Star Faculty Award', a campus-wide student-nominated, student-judged award for outstanding undergraduate teaching.

Her research specialty is the study of the ring systems which gird all 4 giant planets in the outer solar system. She has made major scientific contributions in the understanding of the structure and phenomenology of planetary rings and the gravitational interactions between ring particles and the natural satellites which orbit the outer planets. Her doctoral work on the rings of Saturn includes the discovery of the connection between Saturn's ring spokes and its magnetic field. Using Voyager Uranus data, she did the defining research on the shepherding of the Uranian rings; with Voyager Neptune data, she proposed a dynamical explanation for the confinement of the Neptune ring arcs. Since then, she has been involved in elucidating the possible role of acoustic oscillations within Saturn in creating ring features and in modeling the light scattering behavior of Saturn's rings -- ideas that will be tested when Cassini arrives at Saturn in 2004.

She has been an active participant in guiding the American planetary exploration program through membership on several important NASA advisory committees, including the Solar System Exploration Subcommittee, the Mars Observer Recovery Study Team, and the Solar System Road Map Development Team. She recently served as the chaiperson for a small NASA advisory working group to study and develop future outer solar system missions. She is presently the Vice Chair of the Steering Group for the Solar System Decadal Survey, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and NASA.

Dr. Porco has made many radio and television appearances, explaining science to the layman, including two MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour interviews in 1989, and many TV programs and documentaries on planetary exploration. She was a strong and visible defendent of the usage of radioactive materials on the
Cassini spacecraft; in particular, she participated in a nationally aired radio debate with Karl Grossman, a leader among anti-nuclear activists, in October 1997. She was a consultant on the movie `Contact' and participated in a series of panel discussions at the American Film Institute in Hollywood to discuss `Creating Network Television About Scientists and Engineers' and `Portraying Real Science and Technology in the Movies'.

She has also given many newspaper and magazine interviews, and has been profiled seven times in print, beginning in 1989 (Boston Globe, October, 1989) and recently in the New York Times (August 1999). In late 1999, she was selected by the Sunday London Times as one of 18 scientific leaders of the
21st century.

Dr. Porco has been, and continues to be, active in the presentation of science to the public. She was a member of a committee chaired by Carl Sagan in 1994 entitled `Public Communication of NASA's Science.' Her popular scientific writings have been published in the London Sunday Times,
the Guardian, Astronomy Magazine and the Arizona Daily Star.

Her contributions to the exploration of the outer solar system were recently recognized with the naming of Asteroid (7231) Porco: `Named in honor of Carolyn C. Porco, a pioneer in the study of planetary ring systems...and a leader in spacecraft exploration of the outer solar system.'

Finally, Dr. Porco was responsible for the proposal to honor the late reknowned planetary geologist, Eugene Shoemaker, by sending his cremains to the Moon aboard the Lunar Prospector spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral on January 6, 1998. Accompanying this unprecedented payload was a tribute designed and produced by Dr. Porco which may be viewed at:
http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/tribute.html