Cassini Exploration Of Saturn Featured In Talk At Institute For Advanced Study

Planetary scientist Carolyn C. Porco, a leading figure in the study of planetary ring systems and spacecraft exploration of the outer solar system, will present "In Orbit! Cassini Explores the Saturn System" on April 11 at 4:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the campus of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Dr. Porco is the Cassini Imaging Team Leader for the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn, an international mission that placed a spacecraft in orbit around Saturn in mid-2004, and deployed an atmospheric probe to Saturn's largest satellite, Titan, in early 2005. The landing of the Huygens probe on Titan and Cassini�s explorations of the saturnian environment are already the stuff of legend. What they have found thus far, and the images they have collected, are being closely examined in the pursuit of precise scientific information on the nature of this very alien system.

Dr. Porco is Director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS) at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She received her Ph.D. in 1983 from the California Institute of Technology in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, having completed her doctoral dissertation on Voyager discoveries in the rings of Saturn. In 1983, she was made a member of the Voyager Imaging Team and subsequently participated in the Voyager encounters with Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989.

In 1990, she was selected as the leader of the Imaging Team for the Cassini mission to Saturn. She is also an imaging scientist on the Pluto/Kuiper Belt mission called New Horizons, which will launch to Pluto in 2006. Dr. Porco has been an active participant in guiding the American planetary exploration program through membership on a series of NASA advisory committees in the 1990s, including the Solar System Exploration Subcommittee and the Solar System Road Map Development Team. She served as the chairperson for a small NASA advisory working group to study and develop future outer solar system mission concepts and she recently served as the Vice Chairperson of the Steering Group for the Solar System Decadal Survey, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and NASA. Dr. Porco was responsible for the proposal to honor the late renowned planetary geologist, Eugene Shoemaker, by sending his remains 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) "Porco."

The lecture, which is sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study�s School of Natural Sciences, is free and open to the public. For further information, call (609) 734-8203.