Uncut@: http://beyondbelief2006.org/
Carolyn Porco is a truly inspiring speaker on the potential of humankind for creative accomplishment—how science and especially the exploration of space, our most challenging and exciting frontier, encourage our highest aspirations for human betterment. Carolyn C. Porco is an American planeta
ry scientist and the leader of the imaging science team on the Cassini mission, presently in orbit around Saturn. In late 1999, she was selected by the London Sunday Times as one of 18 scientific leaders of the 21st century, and by Industrial Week as one of "50 Stars to Watch".[4] Porco was responsi
ble 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. Her contributions to the exploration of the outer solar system were recognized with the naming of Asteroid (7231) Por
co: "Named in honor of Carolyn C. Porco, a pioneer in the study of planetary ring systems...and a leader in spacecraft exploration of the outer solar system". Porco was an imaging scientist on the Voyager mission in the 1980s, and is also an imaging scientist on the New Horizons mission launched to
Pluto on January 19, 2006. She is an expert on planetary rings and the Saturnian moon, Enceladus. As a young Voyager scientist, she was the first person to describe the behavior of the eccentric ringlets and the "spokes" discovered by Voyager within the rings of Saturn, to elucidate the mechanism b
y which the outer Uranian rings were being shepherded by the Voyager-discovered moons Cordelia and Ophelia, and to provide an explanation for the shepherding of the rings arcs of Neptune by the moon Galatea, also discovered by Voyager. She was a co-originator of the idea to take a 'portrait of the p
lanets' with the Voyager spacecraft, and participated in the planning, design, and execution of those images in 1991, including the famous Pale Blue Dot image of Earth

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