It’s like there’s a pulsating, hidden world, governed by ancient laws and principles, underlying everything around us – from the movements of electrical charges to the motions of the planets – and most people are completely unaware of it. To me, that’s a shame. Carolyn Porco Read Quote
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. Carolyn Porco Read Quote
The Huygens images were everything our images from orbit were not. Instead of hazy, sinuous features that we could only guess were streams and drainage channels, here was incontrovertible evidence that at some point in Titan’s history – and perhaps even now – there were flowing liquid hydrocarbons on the surface. Carolyn Porco Read Quote
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. Carolyn Porco Read Quote
I am uneasy about having scientific exploration depend on profit-making companies. Carolyn Porco Read Quote
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. Carolyn Porco Read Quote
I read about eastern philosophy and religion and existentialism. All that introspective thinking got me thinking about the great beyond. That turned my sights from inwards to outwards, and I started becoming interested in the makeup of the universe, and I started reading about astronomy, planets, and galaxies. Carolyn Porco Read Quote
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. Carolyn Porco Read Quote
To my mind, most people go through life recoiling from its best parts. They miss the enrichment that just a basic knowledge of the physical world can bring to the most ordinary experiences. Carolyn Porco Read Quote
Even by the diverse standards of Saturn’s satellites, Enceladus was an outlier. Its icy surface was as white and bright as fresh snow, and whereas the other airless moons were heavily pocked with craters, Enceladus was mantled in places with extensive plains of smooth, uncratered terrain, a clear sign of past internally driven geologic activity. Carolyn Porco Read Quote