Carolyn Porco

December 31, 2023

Dear Friends,

So here we are, another year over, a new one about to begin.

There is much to be concerned about at this juncture. The US, and indeed the world, today are being blown by political and social winds that were in play nearly a century ago. And the disastrous undoing of the world order at that time, its horrifying evolution, and the clear object lesson those past events serve today in how to ensure it doesn't all happen again are, to the amazement of many of us, going unheeded by too many. This past year, I've taken to asking friends, 'What are you going to do if the US turns fascist in the next election? Are you going to leave the country?' I can say that a not insignificant number of those friends are working on their list of possible destinations.

This time of year presses us to look forward at the 'second chance' a new year always brings, so that's what I'm doing one more time this year, with feeling, and I hope that you are too. Remember: it's not over til it's over. There are some impressive countervailing forces at work that could win in the end: eg, Jack Smith, kick-ass special prosecutor if there ever was one; states removing the orange one from their election ballots; successful lawsuits challenging seriously gerrymandered election maps; etc. And people are coming to realize that traditional pre-election signposts, like polls, that have indicated in the past the direction the country is likely to go, are no longer as accurate as they once were.

These are, in fact, just some of the good reasons to hope for the best.

We now face a new beginning and another chance to get it right. I've vowed to myself to work hard in the coming year to stay positive about the possibilities, despite the struggles, and do what I can do to ensure that good things happen in the coming year. Will you be joining me?

Happy New Year to everyone!

Carolyn Porco

November 22, 2023

Dear Friends,

For those of you at least as old as I am, you will recognize today's date as the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It was an unspeakable horror, that one November day in 1963, that left indelible memories and life-long emotional ties.

I still remember the flow of events. I was 10 years old, living with my family in the Bronx in New York City, only a block away and around the corner from Public School 71 where I attended school. That day, we were released from school earlier than usual but were not told why. On the way home I stopped in a delicatessen, three storefronts from my house, to buy a treat. Some other youngster, presumably there for the same reason, excitedly told me that President Kennedy had been shot.

My mother idolized JFK and I desperately wanted to tell her what had happened. So, I immediately dashed the remaining 70 feet to my house, barged through the front door, and hollered for my mother. She came rushing out of the kitchen, alarmed at the ruckus. I blurted out the news. In disbelief, she quickly turned on the television. Walter Cronkite had already announced that Kennedy had died of his wounds and news of it was everywhere. No one wants to see their mother upset, and mine was so painfully distressed that I cry even today just thinking about it.

That awful moment began the famous Four Days in November, when America, and much of the world, remained hypnotically, immovably transfixed to their living room television by a deep need for communal sharing of grief and shock, and of being witness to the unfolding mournful, funereal ceremony and the rites and protocols by which America commemorated and buried its dead leader. Who among us who lived through it all could ever forget a dread-filled Lyndon Johnson hastily taking the oath of President on Air Force One? Or the simple, horse-drawn caisson carrying JFK's coffin and, in an ancient ritual dating back to Genghis Khan, the riderless horse that followed, with rear-facing boots in silver stirrups signifying the fallen leader? Or the grace and stoicism of JFK's widow, Jackie? Or tiny JFK Jr's poignant salute to his father?

In those four days of televised history-making events, the world was guided from violence to dignity, from tragedy to acceptance, from chaos to finale. That solemn procession was precisely what people the world over, and we Americans in particular, badly needed. The nation endured and life continued.

--------------------------------------

The following summer, on August 27, 1964, JFK's Attorney General and brother, Robert Kennedy, who would lose his own life to an assassin four years later, eulogized his brother at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He said, through evident pain,

"When I think of President Kennedy, I think of what Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet:

'When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars
And he shall make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.' "

Inspired by Robert Kennedy, I used the very same words 34 years later to eulogize one of my own heroes, planetary geologist and a former Caltech professor of mine, Eugene Shoemaker, by inscribing them onto a brass foil and sending them, along with Shoemaker's cremains, to the Moon on the Lunar Prospector spacecraft. The entire package crash-landed into the south polar region of the Moon in July 1999, thirty-years to the month after the landing of Apollo 11 and humankind's first lunar footsteps. https://ciclops.org/public/tribute.html

And with that, the cycle was complete ... from the calamitous death of one hero to the death of another ... joined by the timeless words of Shakespeare.

--------------------------------------------

Tomorrow will be Thanksgiving Day in the US ... the day that we Americans pause to express thanks for all those things that make our lives and our time on this planet meaningful.

To take reckoning of your own life, and all the wonder-filled moments and events, both personal and not, and the opportunities and knowledge -- yes, knowledge! -- you have gained from them, and to dwell on and be grateful for all of it, is a salve for the heart and soul. One of the most effective practices of gratitude for me starts outdoors, on a clear, dark night, gazing up at a starlit sky and absorbing its message.

I repeat here what I wrote on Facebook on Dec 20, 2022, prior to the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn two days later:

"Be sure to spend some time reveling in the rarity of the moment, the beauty of the starlit skies of our planet, the antiquity of the Universe, and how fortunate we all are to have the celestial wonders that surround us ... our planetary neighbors, the very distant stars and nebulae in our own galaxy, all the billions upon billions of immensely distant galaxies ... laid out before our eyes in such glorious splendor. The night sky is the only scene we can savor that is 13.8 billion years old. No experience can better convey the profundity and significance of our own limited existence and the improbable blessing of being alive, than gazing, with knowledge and acceptance, upon its starry countenance."

There is enough gratitude to be had in that magnificent view and what it has taught us to last a lifetime.

Remember that tomorrow as you all have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Carolyn Porco

November 9, 2023

Dear Friends,

Today is the 89th birthday of my colleague and friend, and one of my biggest heroes, Carl Sagan … a man still very much loved and still very much missed.

Happy Birthday to Carl!

-------------------------------------------------------

But it is also a very special day in the life of Cassini’s exploration of Saturn.

It was 20 years ago today that we on Cassini sighted the planet Saturn, alluring, mysterious, beckoning, 111 million kilometers (69 million miles) in the distance … about three-fourths the distance between the Sun and the Earth. https://ciclops.org/view.php%3Fid=74.html

After 13 long years designing, building, and launching the spacecraft and all its many systems and scientific instruments, and after enduring 6 years to cross the solar system, we were now less than 8 months away from entrance into Saturn orbit.

It wasn’t the first time we sighted Saturn on our journey there. We had done so a year earlier. There is a rather embarrassing story behind the public release of that first 2002 image that I won’t tell here. I am saving it, and many other backstories of our imaging adventures to and around Saturn, for my first book. How’s that for a teaser?

But what made today’s anniversary image different from its predecessor a year earlier was the cache of five of Saturn’s seven main satellites -- Mimas, Enceladus, Dione, Tethys, Dione and Rhea – and the details we could now see on the planet and in the rings. We could not resolve any of these moons at this point but divisions in the planet’s rings, like the 4800-km (2980-mi) wide Cassini Division between the outer A ring and the bright B ring, and the much narrower, 325-km (200-mi) wide Encke gap near the outer edge of the A ring, were clearly visible, as was the fainter C ring interior to the B ring. The multi-banded structure and the delicate hues of yellow, brown and pink in the southern atmosphere were also becoming more apparent.

And then there was that blue in the northern hemisphere. I thought at the time, blue? Where did that come from?! There was no blue in the Saturn atmosphere when the Voyagers flew by the planet in late 1980 and mid-1981. I was mystified. The Saturn experts on my team guessed that it was produced by molecular hydrogen scattering at altitudes above the haze and clouds, where the atmosphere is clear … in other words, the same process (though a different compound) that turns our sky blue. That guess, turns out, is likely only part of the answer -- see my forthcoming book for the full answer -- but I was overjoyed at the presence of this new color in the Saturn atmosphere. It meant that our images were going to be gloriously colorful – watch out, Jupiter! -- and would no doubt dazzle us as well as our followers. I was not wrong.

With this distant Saturn image in hand, our excitement and anticipation of what lay ahead began reaching acute levels.

One of my team members, Gerhard Neukum, a professor at Free University in Berlin, Germany, said of the moons, "Soon we will be in orbit around Saturn to investigate these worlds in detail and to decipher their geologic history from close-up images - an exciting prospect."

Another imaging team member, Anthony DelGenio, a specialist in atmospheric studies from NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said, “For all of us who have worked for more than a decade preparing for this mission, seeing Saturn grow larger and larger in the eyes of the Cassini cameras is a bit like the feelings children have as they come downstairs on Christmas morning to see what gifts are waiting for them under the tree. But this Christmas will last for four years." What we didn’t know then was that Cassini’s Christmas would last 13 years!

And Wesley Huntress, the director of NASA’s Solar System Exploration Division in 1990 and the individual who made the final selections at that time of all of us principal investigators and team leaders, exclaimed, “Wow! So far away, so long to travel, so much effort to make it happen, and so worth it".

Of course, how ‘worth it’ it would be depended on us getting successfully into orbit on July 1, 2004. But at this point in the voyage, it was looking very good.
-------------------------------------------------

It has seemed to me for a while now that today’s 20-year anniversary of Cassini’s ‘Portal View’ might provide a lovely opportunity to begin a chronological retrospective of what we found at Saturn during Cassini’s time there. At a time when so many aspects of modern life seem to be unraveling, it would remind us of how wonder-filled and reassuring it felt to know that our magnificent, golden emissary to Saturn was faithfully conducting its work, revealing to us one marvel after another, and that for so many years, we could look forward almost daily to the possibility of a new and spectacular vision of a far-flung alien world.

For those members of the generation who missed it the first time around, it would be their chance to learn the full story and witness it as it unfolded.

And note well …. all of you would receive from me something you cannot get from the countless individuals who post our Cassini images on social media … the real stories behind the images. Why they were taken? What did we learn from them that we didn’t know before? Were they scientifically successful? Did the taking of the image pose any particular challenges? Were they processed to bring out any particular aspect of the body being imaged? Did it require any additional information or data gathered from other Cassini instruments to arrive at the full scientific value? All this and more … from the person who not only led the team that planned all those images and made them happen, but from the person who also set the guidelines and procedures for the careful and artful processing, captioning, and posting of those images for public consumption. It all required visual balance, attention to natural color reproduction, and a degree of meticulousness that had never been done before in the planetary program. As a result, our images were and still are much beloved the world over. Call me proud!

I have yet to work out how long this retrospective will take. To take a full 13-years might be too much, you think? I would be 84 years old by the time Cassini re-crashes into Saturn! Probably not going to happen.

I’ll certainly be thinking about this matter before the next installment in this re-enactment. And if you have any suggestions, send them along!

So, consider this post the beginning of our sentimental look back at Cassini’s time at Saturn. And if you or anyone else you know would like to join this adventure via my newsletter. which will allow me the opportunity to provide more details and will therefore be richer, you and they can do so by registering for my newsletter.

https://listserv.ciclops.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

With that, I bid you farewell, and as I said long ago as we were approaching Saturn … Prepare to be amazed!

Wishing you all the best!

Carolyn Porco

October 24, 2023

Dear Friends,

Today, I'm announcing the release of a fabulous and beautiful new book!

It is called "The Future of Exploration" and it contains riveting essays written by an impressive collection of noted explorers, telling their own stories and giving their own insights into the importance of exploration, its deep roots in the human psyche, and what the future of exploration might look like.

Among this group of some 36 explorers, there is Her Deepness, Sylvia Earle, who has devoted her life to studying the ecosystems and lifeforms that lie deep beneath the waves and advocating incessantly for the preservation of Earth's oceans.

There's Bob Ballard, renowned discoverer of the Titanic and explorer of the ocean floor and its topography. It is he whose many seafloor discoveries include hot springs on the ocean floor and the strange ecosystems surrounding them.

No serious compilation of explorers could omit Jane Goodall whose life spent understanding chimpanzees and their societies has made her name synonymous with the plight of primates whose habitats we humans are rapidly destroying. Her persistent, heart-felt advocacy for conservation of those habitats continues to this day.

World-famous Egyptian archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, whose remarkable discoveries include a lost golden city in the Valley of the Kings and the oldest complete mummy ever found, puts in an appearance.

So do Louise Leakey, grand-daughter to Louis; Yvon Chouinard, champion entrepreneur of alpine climbing and iconic environmental activist; Dereck Joubert, who, with his wife Beverly, form a couple of world-famous filmmakers, conservationists and explorers. They founded the Big Cats Initiative that today protects big cats across 29 countries.

And many more. Among all these giants, you'll even find an essay by yours truly. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't over-the-moon proud about that. I lead a charmed existence!

The curators of this collection of essays are no slouches themselves. Terry Garcia has held a slew of high-level positions over his extraordinary career in the exploration and protection of the Earth's natural wonders, among them Deputy Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere; and Executive VP and Chief Science and Exploration Officer for the National Geographic Society, in which he was responsible for the Society's core mission programs.

Chris Rainier, who was born into a genealogy that includes a British admiral who sailed the high seas in support of the British empire in the 1700s, is a documentary filmmaker, photographer (he was Ansel Adams’ last photographic assistant), and has led expeditions to all seven continents and the North Pole. His photographs and books are archived in the collections of museums around the world, including New York, Chicago, DC, Australia and Canada.

For more information, here is the website devoted to the book: https://thefutureofexploration.org/

It is truly a remarkable compilation, filled with amazing adventures, captivating stories, beautiful images, all printed in one place and on lovely paper.

To order the book -- and I mean it when I say, you won't regret it! -- go to Amazon (of course): tinyurl.com/2p8phbhp

NOTE: None of us has been or will be paid for our essays. All proceeds will go towards the worthy cause of funding grants to support future exploration.

Best to all of you!
Carolyn Porco

Hey all ... I'm starting a newsletter!

My intent is to share (occasionally) news & views on developments in the world, the solar system, & the Universe ... focusing on the big science-related issues of the day, and how our world has gotten to this point and where it might be headed.

If that sounds like fun, subscribe here and join the already 6200+ who took the leap!
https://listserv.ciclops.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

Now, this newsletter may eventually turn into a Substack publication. Substack is an online platform that makes publishing long-form pieces and delivering them to subscribers very easy. It apparently also has a feature called Notes which allows publishing/reposting short-form content, similar to Tweets.

I'm wondering if these different ways of interacting would be of interest to you? If so, feel free to let me know in the comments.

In the meantime, I hope to see your name turn up on my email list!

Cheers,
Carolyn Porco

July 19, 2023

Dear Friends,

Today, we remember a remarkable event that took place exactly ten years ago. It was the day we on Cassini turned our cameras to image the Earth and Saturn's rings from the planet's shadow, while people the world over smiled at the glory of life & their own precious existence on our lovely blue ocean planet.

The idea had its origins in my participation in the planning of the original 1990 Pale Blue Dot image of Earth taken by Voyager 1 from beyond the orbit of Neptune. I knew with a far better imaging system, like we would have on Cassini, a vastly better and more beautiful image of Earth from the vicinity of Saturn would be possible. And so, upon learning only 9 months after the original Pale Blue Dot image was taken, that I would be the imaging team leader on the Cassini mission, I vowed to myself to do the Pale Blue Dot image over again, only make it better.

It had occurred to me, in the planning of the Cassini redo, how great it would be if we let the people of the world know in advance that their picture would be taken from a billion miles away, and invite them at the appropriate time to go out, contemplate the isolation of our home in space, appreciate the rarity it is among the sun’s planets, marvel at all of life on Earth, and smile at simply being alive on a pale blue dot. It would be, I thought, a chance to stoke some planetary love among the inhabitants of Earth.

And so we sent out the word. The big day would be July 19, 2013. And as that day drew closer, the excitement grew.

I wrote a piece for the BBC website describing the 'why, how, when and where' of the upcoming event: https://tinyurl.com/ys8586bu

Richard Branson personally invited his fans and followers to join the party: https://tinyurl.com/79u5wab3

Morgan Freeman assisted in spreading the word by narrating a short video clip to the music of Stevie Wonder: https://tinyurl.com/yc8cxn7n

And at the appointed time, people the world over went outside, with friends and family, to look up, contemplate their own lives and cosmic whereabouts, and thrill at the thought of having their picture taken from so far away.

I suspect today there will be many remembrances of this event on social media. Do you remember what you were doing when Cassini was imaging the Earth 10 years ago?

Here is one remembrance of which I'm sure: a chat I had with my friends at StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice, about the genesis of the Day the Earth Smiled image and event: https://youtu.be/ed9cXc1sR4k

It is certainly a lovely memory for me, one I will enjoy until the end of my days.

Here's wishing you all a Happy 'Day the Earth Smiled'!

Carolyn Porco

Friends,

May the 4th be with you!

[Industrial Light and Magic, Presidio, San Francisco, CA 2015]

Hey!

After a long hiatus due to Cassini contract closure in 2019, COVID, domicile moves, etc, I'm holding our 7th Enceladus Focus Group workshop at UCLA the last week of March.

Our group's origins & mission are told here: https://bit.ly/3Fktovm

The goal for this meeting? To gather together those studying Enceladus for a mighty, 2-day free-for-all brain exchange on what makes the moon tick, how best to search for life there & what future missions need to accomplish.

The 2017 Enceladus Focus Group meeting at UC Berkeley resulted in this Special Issue in Astrobiology Journal : https://bit.ly/3ZQIhho

This time I'll be working to keep Enceladus on everyone's radar, with the hope of a new start for a Flagship Mission return at the end of this decade.

Enceladus remains, after all these years, the most promising place in the solar system to search for extraterrestrial life. What are we waiting for?!

Keep fingers crossed and stay tuned for future updates!

Carolyn Porco

Friends,

As you may know already, I've had rather critical things to say about the futuristic talk and goals of Musk, and especially his space activities. One venture in my crosshairs, in particular, is his business plan, development, and advertised performance of Starlink, his 42,000 internet satellite constellation that has started a Gadarene rush to populate low Earth orbit with what could end up being over 100,000 satellites.

Well, I've just today come upon an outfit called Common Sense Skeptic which is doing a great job of calling out some of the foolish proclamations we're hearing from the commercial space community, especially Musk. Here is their YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgKWj1pn3_7hRSFIypunYog

They are also on Twitter and on Instagram .

In particular, check out this video they produced debunking Starlink, and pointing to a repeat of the same business model that resulted in the failure of Musk's solar panel venture, Solar City.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vuMzGhc1cg

Enjoy!
Carolyn Porco

DEBUNKING STARLINK Yet another Elon Musk project that doesn't live up to the promises - and this one might be the worst one yet!8/10/22 UPDATE:StarLink failed to meet the basic...

You've heard of spatial entanglement in quantum mechanics, right?

Did you know that there is also temporal entanglement? Between photons that never even co-existed?!

Wild, huh?

Always remember the message of special relativity: Each view of the Universe yields a different reality.

You thought quantum mechanics was weird: check out entangled time | Aeon Ideas We think we know how quantum particles get ‘entangled’ across space – but what about entanglement through time?

Friends .... I have an issue I need help with.

I've been trying for a while now to download all my content on Facebook, and what I seem to have found is very disappointing: what one can download is very limited. For instance, when I choose Comments to download, I don't get all the comments I've made over the years, and it's not even possible to download the comments that others have made to my posts. That is the very best part of my presence on this page, is seeing what you all have to say. And all that is lost in any attempt to archive one's content.

But what's even worse is that there doesn't seem to be a way to download all the photos I've posted. From what I can tell, I get a few images that I put in albums. But I rarely did that, so that the vast majority of my photos do now download.

Perhaps some of you have encountered these issues before? Do any of you have any suggestions or experiences with this?

Thanks in advance for any insights,
Carolyn Porco

It was such a joy to attend and give a keynote lecture at the Interplanetary Festival, a conference of thinkers working on the frontiers of their respective fields held at the Santa Fe Institute last fall.

All panels & keynotes from the Festival are now up on YouTube:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlVBTf7N6GrL6ceDXxGuD22YFV_wRp0S

Dive into the playlist for discussions on , , , , , , , and more.

As for my keynote presentation, the best part of all was artist Dario Robleto's 7-min intro of me!

Don't miss it! https://bit.ly/3YVd4Zh

Keynote: Cassini to Saturn: The Journey, The Legacy, The Future by Carolyn Porco-InterPlanetary 2022 Thirty-two years ago, the United States and Europe joined together to undertake a mission to the outer solar system. It was named Cassini and called for a 7...

Dear Friends,

Happy Pale Blue Dot day! 💕

Very proud to say that I was there, helping to make it happen, all those years ago.

Here's a piece I wrote for Scientific American on how the Voyager Pale Blue Dot image of Earth, taken on Valentine's Day 1990, from beyond the orbit of Neptune, came to be. https://bit.ly/3RZ1Rok

Best,
Carolyn

Hear ye! Hear ye! 🎺🎈

Scott Tremaine, renowned celestial dynamicist & a founder (along w/ my thesis advisor Peter Goldreich) of the field of planetary rings, has written a textbook on "The Dynamics of Planetary Systems". At my request of some time ago, he included in his book a discussion of the definition of a planet. (Thank you, Scott!)

And what did he find? 🥁

Pluto is NOT a planet !!!

[If you have Scott's book, the criterion can be found Figure 9.2 on page 450, in equation form on p 451.]

Reason has prevailed. Rejoice!

Hello Everyone,

I know you haven't heard from me in a long while. For technical reasons, having to do with a change in Facebook regulations, I was locked out of making posts to this page for most of the year.

But now I'm back! Many thanks to .com/maiaw who not only set up this 'fan page' long ago but showed me how to fix the issue and take proper control of the site. Way to go, Maia!

I very much hope you're all having a lovely holiday season. There have been some brutal weather conditions and other developments around the world, and I hope you've managed to miss the worst of it.

I'm actually quite hopeful that 2023 will be a good year. In the US, we've made great progress in pushing back against the madness that has consumed our national life for nearly a decade, and with continued effort, that momentum will steadily grow in the coming year.

So, prepare yourselves for more progress-making, and a Happy New Year to all!

See you in 2023!

Carolyn Porco

March 1, 2022

Everyone,

After nearly a quarter of a century, and over 4 years since the end of Cassini, the official Cassini Imaging Team website ...

http://CICLOPS.org
.. has been recast into its final legacy form and is retiring. It has been converted from a dynamic site, built, with every click, one page at a time with information extracted from various databases, to a static one requiring no on-the-fly computation. What it looks like today is the way it will look in perpetuity.

This has been a very big task and required my going through the site, correcting broken links and other mistakes, improving organization, making stylistic changes, and adding supporting materials. And it required collecting together a team of volunteers, with skills in php, html, website configuration, cloud services, and operating systems, to convert and migrate it to the cloud. The members of the CICLOPS Legacy Team are mentioned here: http://ciclops.org/webcredits.php.html

(In addition, assistance was freely given to migrate other software packages that I will be using in the future to write my book. Yes, there will be a book ... eventually.)

I am very pleased to say that, as a result of a remarkable team effort over the last 2 months, all done remotely, the site is far better and faster than it ever was.

To mark this big moment, I have today posted a final Captain's Log, appropriately called 'Epilogue', in which I remind us all of the intent for the site when it was first established in 1999, its various components, the highlights of the Cassini mission, and most importantly for us, the discoveries made by my imaging team members and I in 20 years of producing the visual record of our travels to and around Saturn.

It was an extraordinary experience in every way. It is worth remembering.

I hope that, in the future, you visit http://CICLOPS.org when you wish to recall that experience and those glorious years traveling Saturn.

Enjoy!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team leader
Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley, CA
Fellow, California Academy of Sciences