Carolyn Porco

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Carolyn (at right) re-enacting the famous Beatles photograph at Abbey Road with the other members of the Cassini Imaging Team.

Carolyn C. Porco is an American planetary scientist. She is an expert on planetary rings and was the first to describe the causes of the eccentric ringlets and the behavior of 'spokes' within the rings of Saturn that were discovered by the Voyager probe. She did her thesis under Peter Goldreich at Caltech. Porco went on to administer Voyager's imaging of the rings of Uranus and Neptune. She is now the leader of the imaging team on the Cassini mission to Saturn. Porco was a tenured professor at The University of Arizona in Tucson, but resigned her post to deal with Cassini matters full-time. She heads the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS (CICLOPS) which manages the imaging experiment. CICLOPS is now part of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

The asteroid 7231 Porco is named after her.

Carolyn Porco is famously fascinated by the 1960s and The Beatles and has, at times, incorporated references to The Beatles and their music into her presentations, writings and press releases.