Porco

Carolyn Porco, an astronomer whose talents have graced the scientific world with iconic planetary photographs – portrait of the planets (1990), pale blue dot (1990), Saturn solar eclipse (2006) and Saturn on the day the Earth smiled (2013) – speaks April 9 at 4:30 p.m. in G-01 Uris Hall. Her talk: “A Decade at Saturn.”

Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., is director of NASA’s Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations, or CICLOPS, which is the uplink and downlink center for the mission’s picture processes.

As if taking cool pictures weren’t enough, Porco worked with film director J.J. Abrams as the planetary image consultant on the 2009 film “Star Trek.” At Porco’s suggestion, one of the film’s memorable scenes shows the starship Enterprise rising from the gaseous atmosphere of Saturnian moon Titan, displaying the magnificence of Saturn and its rings.

Porco was named one the 25 most influential people in space by Time magazine. In 2010 she was awarded the Carl Sagan Medal, presented by the American Astronomical Society for Excellence in the Communication of Science to the Public. On Twitter, Porco has 22,200 followers and at last count, she has tweeted 10,800 times.

Since 1990 Porco has been the leader of the imaging team for the Cassini mission. In the course of the mission, she and her team have discovered seven Saturnian moons: Methone, Pallene, Polydeuces, Daphnis, Anthe, Aegaeon and a small moonlet in the outer B ring. In 1983, Porco joined the University of Arizona faculty and became a member of the Voyager Imaging Team.

She earned a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook (1974) and her doctorate from the California Institute of Technology (1983).