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 plan Voyager's imaging of the rings of Uranus and Neptune, and led the ring sequence planning for the Neptune encounter. 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 operates the Cassini imaging science experiment. CICLOPS is now part of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

The asteroid 7231 Porco is named after her.

Porco was responsible for the epitaph and proposal to honor the late renowned planetary geologist, Eugene Shoemaker, by sending his cremains to the Moon aboard the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1998.

In late 1999, she was selected by the Sunday London Times as one of 18 scientific leaders of the 21st century, and by Industrial Week as one of "50 Stars to Watch".

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.