Carolyn Porco
Carolyn Porco
Carolyn C. Porcois an American planetary scientist known for her work in the exploration of the outer solar system, beginning with her imaging work on the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s. She leads the imaging science team on the Cassini mission currently in orbit around Saturn. She is an expert on planetary rings and the Saturnian moon, Enceladus...
moon world territory
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,
ice produces water
Once the water comes out it freezes, and that produces copious amounts of ice particles.
clear contain crystals determine device future greater ice left means precision require themselves
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.
active
Enceladus is surprisingly warm, internally fractured and active ...
heart surely thrilling
This has been a heart-stopper, and surely one of our most thrilling results.
discovered extended hope
After what we've discovered with Cassini, if we don't get an extended mission, then there's no hope for anybody.
closer conducting scientific spent surface time water winner
So, water closer to the surface and more time spent conducting scientific investigations....sounds like a winner to me.
confident exhausted fairly liquid
So we think we have a Yellowstone-type liquid geyser tens of meters deep. We're fairly confident because we have exhausted all the other models.
ball evidence far grail hit holy liquid planetary solar somewhere water
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.
liquid living potential
Once you have liquid water, you have the potential for living organisms.
alone mission
If we had done nothing else, these findings alone would have made the Cassini mission worthwhile.
ball hit
If we're right, we've just hit the ball right out of the park.
looking phenomena rings seen since
Since we hadn't ever seen the rings in this kind of detail, we were looking for phenomena we'd never seen before.
looking south
We're looking at some kind of focusing. We can't say why it would be at the south pole.