Carolyn Porco Quotes

We do have, and will continue to have an unquenchable curiosity to understand our Solar System.

We've explored every type of environment in the solar system at least once.

No one planet can tell us everything about the universe, but Neptune seems to hold more than its share of information about the formation of our own solar system - as well as the solar systems beyond.

Before 1995, the only planets we knew about were the planets in our solar system.

The solar system should be viewed as our backyard, not as some sequence of destinations that we do one at a time.

Some things are only capable of being done in space. Examples of that are looking at our Earth from that far away, and understanding the entire processes of storms and weather patterns, and oceans, and coastlines.

A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth.

Yesterday, we sought telescopes good enough to see all the planets. Today, we seek vehicles good enough to reach them.

I like the planets because they are real places that you can go to and send machines to. Faraway astronomy - galactic astronomy and extra-galactic astronomy - is really cool stuff, but to me, it's about destinations.

You see billions and billions of stars and recognize that you know some of those have planets, too, and maybe there's life out there, and this is just one of billions of galaxies... and so it gives you this huge perspective of how far we potentially have to go for real exploration.

The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.

Just speaking for myself, I think the return of people to the Moon has a lot to offer for understanding the formation and evolution of terrestrial worlds; so would the exploration of near-Earth asteroids by people.

We go to learn about our solar system, to search for life, and to understand what happened to Mars so we avoid it ourselves.

We really have only been observing Neptune with big telescopes since shortly before 1989.

There are other planets besides the Earth and Mars. I'd like to remind you that studying Venus is vital to understanding life elsewhere.

People know a planet when they see one, and I think that's a pretty darn good test, in fact, for planethood.

There was a time when Pluto - which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led - was considered the last planet. We now know there are thousands of other - possibly inhabited - planets.

Hubble made my career.

Space is really domain expansion.

On the second flight, we were doing a lot of science experiments, and we've got a really cool window called the cupola. It's a big, circular window with six panes around, sort of at angles so you can see the Earth, you can see the edge of the Earth, you can go out - look out into the universe. It's pretty spectacular.

We're going to find Marses and maybe Earths out in the solar system's attic of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt.

You could not have predicted the amazing discoveries at Pluto, even though we have been to a couple of objects in the solar system that were at least a little analogous to Pluto.

Every observation that we make, every mission that we send to various places in the solar system is just taking us one step further to finding that truly habitable environment, a water-rich environment.

I actually started my career in planetary science with a master's thesis on Pluto.

I agree that we should go back to the moon and on to Mars. We should treat all objects in the solar system, including comets and asteroids, as exploration targets.