Carolyn Porco Quotes

The gas-giant planets in our solar system all have large moons.

I was, I remember, I still remember when the first time I pointed the telescope at the sky and I saw Saturn with the rings. It was a beautiful image.

There are lots of really interesting little planets out there in the Kuiper Belt, but Pluto's the only one that's got all the cool attributes.

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

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.

In the four years since its launch, Kepler has chalked up 122 new and confirmed planets. It's also caught the scent of nearly three thousand additional objects, of which probably 80 percent or more will turn out to be other-worldly orbs.

If you slid Pluto to where Earth is right now, heat from the sun would evaporate that ice, and it would grow a tail. Now that's no kind of behavior for a planet.

Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god, but a great rock, and the sun a hot rock.

The Sun, Moon and Stars are there to guide us.

The cosmic game changed forever in 1992. Before then, logic told us that there had to be other planets besides the nine (if you still count poor Pluto) in our solar system, but until that year, when two astronomers detected faint, telltale radio signals in the constellation Virgo, we had no hard evidence of their existence.

I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.

Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.

The man in the street does not know a star in the sky.

In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet.

I'm working to bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit.

Just because Pluto or comets aren't as big as Jupiter doesn't mean they are not scientifically important - indeed, just the reverse is often true. Sometimes, great things come in small packages.

Voyager found Saturn to be a planet with a complex interior, atmosphere, and magnetosphere. In its rings - a vast, gleaming disk of icy rubble - the mission recorded signs of the same physical mechanisms that were key in configuring the early solar system and similar disks of material around other stars.

As a planetary system, Saturn holds the greatest promise for answering questions that have a far broader scientific reach than Saturn itself.

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

The Kuiper Belt is the largest mapped structure in our planetary system, three times as big as all the territory from the sun out to Neptune's orbit.

The questions that we scientist have about Saturn's rings are the questions that an ordinary person might be moved to ask when first seeing them, you know. What caused them? How did they get there? How long have they been around? How long are they going to last?

Even after years of observing, a new picture of Uranus from Keck Observatory can stop me in my tracks and make me say, 'Wow!'

The first real Cassini image that brought tears to my eyes was an image of Jupiter. I didn't expect it to look so detailed.

There are amateurs who have seen that one of Uranus' poles is brighter than the other, or who have seen cloud formations on the planet. For all we know, interesting things are happening there all the time.

In the mind of the public, the word 'planet' carries a significance lacking in other words used to describe planetary bodies... many members of the public assume that alleged 'non-planets' cease to be interesting enough to warrant scientific exploration.