“This week’s image from our cameras on Cassini is of Mimas, one of those little moons around Saturn that says so much. Mimas is only 250 miles across, and this enormous basin we see here sideways, called Herschel crater, was created by a projectile that came very close to blasting Mimas to bits. That straight away told us former Voyager investigators, who first saw Herschel, that there surely were collisions in the Saturn system, and elsewhere in our solar system, that did indeed blast previously existing moons to bits. And so, in this one picture, we see evidence of a process that may have formed ring systems like Saturn’s, created at least part of the asteroid belt, and more.
The central peak in Herschel crater, seen here casting a tell-tale shadow, is nearly as tall as Mt. Everest. Isn’t planetary exploration full of wonders?”
— Carolyn Porco, leader of the imaging science team on the Cassini mission presently in orbit around Saturn, a veteran imaging scientist of the 1980 Voyager mission to the outer solar system, and an imaging scientist on the New Horizons mission on its way to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Porco has co-authored over 110 scientific papers and has become a regular public commentator on science, space exploration and the juncture between religion and science. Her popular science writings have appeared in such distinguished publications as the London Sunday Times, the Guardian, Astronomy Magazine, the Arizona Daily Star, Sky and Telescope, Scientific American, American Scientist, and the PBS and BBC websites. She continues to be active in the presentation of science to the public as the leader of the Cassini Imaging Team. She is the creator/editor of the team’s CICLOPS website where Cassini images are posted, and writes the site’s homepage “Captain’s Log” greetings to the public. She speaks frequently on the Cassini mission and planetary exploration in general, and has appeared recently at such cross-disciplinary conferences as Poptech (2005, 2006) and TED (2007, 2009). Porco served as the character consultant for the 1997 film “Contact,” which was based on the novel by Carl Sagan. In 2008, she was invited by J. J. Abrams, the director/producer of the 2009 release, “Star Trek,” to join the the film’s production crew as a consultant on science and planetary imagery. Porco 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”. In 2012, she was chosen as one of Time’s Top 25 Most Influential People in Space.