Carolyn Porco Quotes

We're in the space exploration business, and the outer solar system is a wild, wooly place. We haven't explored it very well.

When the Voyager 2 spacecraft sped through the Saturnian system more than a quarter of a century ago, it came within 90,000 kilometers of the moon Enceladus. Over the course of a few hours, its cameras returned a handful of images that confounded planetary scientists for years.

I think when people see Pluto revealed by New Horizons, its satellite system, its complex surface, its atmosphere, I think they'll have a hard time saying 'That's not a planet' because it obviously will be, and I think most people are already coming to that opinion anyway, but I think that's really going to drive it home viscerally.

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.

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

It would be impossible in a few words to describe all that we've found with Cassini. No mission has ever gone as deep for as long on a planetary system as rich as Saturn's.

The need for a detailed, comprehensive examination of the Saturn system became clear during the early 1980s, after the two Voyager spacecraft made flybys of the planet. These celebrated events were the opening acts in the story of humanity's exploration of Saturn.

New Horizons isn't just visiting Pluto; it's visiting this entire region. Whatever it finds, this will be a signal moment for planetary exploration - the capstone to our first reconnaissance of the planets of our solar system.

The first mission to Mars did not expect to find craters and river valleys, and yet they did. The first mission to Jupiter didn't expect to find ocean worlds and volcano worlds, but they did.

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.

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.

The solar system is completely wide open. Almost anywhere we go, I'm sure we would learn a lot.

I expect New Horizons will see more that Hubble cannot see.

Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and, until Cassini had arrived, there was the largest single expanse of unexplored terrain that we had remaining in our solar system.

By the year 2000 we will undoubtedly have a sizable operation on the Moon, we will have achieved a manned Mars landing and it's entirely possible we will have flown with men to the outer planets.

This is in a real sense the capstone of the initial missions to explore the planets. Pluto, its moons and this part of the solar system are such mysteries that New Horizons will rewrite all of the textbooks.

I'd love to be an astronaut. I bet you get a better understanding of our planet seeing it from a distance.

We've been surrounded by images of space our whole lives, from the speculative images of science fiction to the inspirational visions of artists to the increasingly beautiful pictures made possible by complex technologies. But whilst we have an overwhelmingly vivid visual understanding of space, we have no sense of what space sounds like.

I think that the first men to land on Pluto are going to make some very astonishing discoveries. But I am also sure that they will never go there in rockets. They will have to make the immense trip by some more powerful means - like the anti-gravitational drive.

Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on.

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

The boundary between space and the earth is purely arbitrary. And I'll probably always be interested in this planet - it's my favorite.

I've been studying the planets and learning the personalities of each planet.

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.

I would love to set foot on another planet - lunar or Mars or somewhere.