[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 138 (Tuesday, September 29, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9926-S9928]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      TRIBUTE TO DR. CAROLYN PORCO

 Mr. UDALL of Colorado. Mr. President, today I praise Dr. 
Carolyn Porco, a professor at the University of Colorado, senior 
researcher at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, CO, and leader of 
the imaging team for the Cassini mission. In this last role, she has a 
front row seat on some of the most exciting scientific discoveries of 
today coming from the Cassini spacecraft, which for 5 years has been 
orbiting and studying Saturn and its Moons. I have submitted for the 
Record an article about Dr. Porco from the September 21, 2009, edition 
of the New York Times.
  In Colorado, we are extremely proud of our science and technology 
enterprise. We have 16 Federal laboratories, top-flight research 
universities and a vibrant private sector pushing the limits on 
everything from biomedical research to space exploration. But even in 
this crowded field, Dr. Porco stands out as an exemplary Colorado 
scientist. She has repeatedly been recognized as one of the top 
scientific leaders to watch this century both for her scientific 
accomplishments and her leadership within the scientific community. As 
the Times article shows, she

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has come a long way from her humble Bronx upbringing.
  Thinking about Dr. Porco, I am reminded that great scientists are not 
born. They are made. They are made through the hard work and 
determination of the young boy who rejects the stigma that somehow 
being smart is not cool and the young girl who refuses to take a back 
seat to any boy. They are made through the guidance and support of 
countless teachers and mentors who receive far too little credit for 
the service they give to this country. And perhaps most importantly for 
this body, they are made through the investments we make in research, 
development and education. If we want the Carolyn Porcos of the future 
to be here in the United States--and believe me, we do--we must invest 
now in our research agencies, and we must have well-paid, high-quality 
teachers in the classroom.
  Dr. Porco is a stellar example of what we can accomplish as 
individuals and as a nation with focus and a little bit of tenacity. I 
congratulate her on her accomplishments and well-deserved recognition. 
I, for one, will be following her progress and expecting many more 
great things from her in the future.
  I ask that the New York Times article to which I referred be printed 
in the Record.
  The information follows.

              an Odyssey From the Bronx to Saturn's Rings

                          (By Dennis Overbye)

       It is twilight time on Saturn.
       Shadows lengthened to stretch thousands of miles across the 
     planet's famous rings this summer as they slowly tilted edge-
     on to the Sun, which they do every 15 years, casting into 
     sharp relief every bump and wiggle and warp in the buttery 
     and wafer-thin bands that are the solar system's most popular 
     scenic attraction.
       From her metaphorical perch on the bridge of the Cassini 
     spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn for five years, 
     Carolyn Porco, who heads the camera team, is ecstatic about 
     the view. ``It's another one of those things that make you 
     pinch yourself and say, `Boy am I lucky to be around now,' '' 
     Dr. Porco said. ``For the first time in 400 years, we're 
     seeing Saturn's rings in three dimensions.''
       On Monday, Dr. Porco and the Cassini team released a grand 
     view of the rings in all their shadowed glory, including 
     clumps, spikes, undulations and waves two and a half miles 
     high on the edge of one ring.
       ``We always knew it would be good; instead, it's been 
     extraordinary,'' Dr. Porco said of the cascade of results 
     that have placed her in a spotlight to which she has become 
     increasingly accustomed. ``I feel I'm on a great human 
     adventure,'' she said.
       The work may be carried out by robots, Dr. Porco said, 
     ``but we are all explorers.''
       ``It's thrilling,'' she added, ``and I want everyone to 
     know how thrilling it is.''
       Dr. Porco, 56, a senior researcher at the Space Science 
     Institute in Boulder, Colo., may be the leader of the camera 
     team on the $3.4 billion Cassini mission, an adjunct 
     professor at the University of Colorado and one of Wired 
     magazine's 15 people who should be advising the president. 
     But she is also a proud child of the 1964os who has never let 
     go of the exuberance of that era when President John F. 
     Kennedy ``said that the sky isn't even the limit,'' as she 
     puts it, and ``things were unleashed.''
       Her entries on the Cassini imaging Web site echo the spirit 
     of the character Capt. James T. Kirk on ``Star Trek'':


                     Captain's Log--March 23, 2009

       We are almost there. Saturn and we, its companions, have 
     journeyed together now for nearly five years, in a 
     circumnavigation of the outer solar system.
       Stanley Kubrick's film ``2001: A Space Odyssey'' is still 
     her favorite movie, and she still loves the Beatles. On a 
     visit to England in 2001, she and her imaging colleagues 
     recreated the album cover picture of the Beatles crossing 
     Abbey Road, with Dr. Porco leading, dressed in white like 
     John Lennon.
       Dr. Porco was born and raised in a Bronx family with four 
     brothers she partly credits for her subsequent success in 
     astronomy. ``I'm used to fighting and arguing with males,'' 
     she said.
       Her father, an Italian immigrant, drove a bread truck, and 
     her mother kept house. Dr. Porco attended Cardinal Spellman 
     High School, the same school that Justice Sonia Sotomayor of 
     the Supreme Court attended.
       She was a studious child and a spiritual seeker--``13 going 
     on 80''--who lived a lot in her head. Later, as a student at 
     the State University of New York at Stony Brook, she said she 
     spent two years as a chanting Buddhist and even went on a 
     two-week pilgrimage to Japan, where she was the majorette in 
     a Buddhist marching band, wearing hot pants. ``Now, THOSE 
     were the days,'' she wrote in an e-mail message.
       By then, Dr. Porco was pursuing the future she had glimpsed 
     at age 13 when she saw Saturn through a neighbor's rooftop 
     telescope. As a graduate student at the California Institute 
     of Technolgy, she floundered at first but then got a job 
     helping to analyze data from the two Voyager spacecrafts, 
     which toured the outer planets from Jupiter to Neptune from 
     1978 to 1989.
       It was there, said Peter Goldreich, her thesis advisor, 
     that she demonstrated a knack for picking out important 
     things. Among them was a discovery that mysterious dark 
     spokes in Saturn's ring system were connected to the planet's 
     magnetic field. She did her thesis on aspects of the rings 
     and how they were shaped by the gravity of tiny moonlets.
       Dr. Porco also did a lot of dancing, and played a guitar 
     and sang in the Titan Equatorial Band, a pickup group of 
     scientists and science writers named after a feature on 
     Saturn's largest moon, and later for a group in Tucson called 
     the Estrogens. ``Three women and one very brave guy,'' she 
     said.
       By the time Voyager passed Neptune in 1989, Dr. Porco was a 
     research associate at the University of Arizona and leading a 
     small team trying to make sense of the thin rings around 
     Neptune.
       ``She was one of the young rock stars of Voyager,'' said 
     David Grinspoon, of the Southwest Research Institute in 
     Boulder, who was a graduate student at Arizona at the time.
       But it had not been an easy climb in the overwhelmingly 
     male and competitive environment of space science. Dr. Porco 
     once described scientists as ``schoolyard toughs.'' She 
     recalled pumping herself up to be an ``alpha male'' before 
     meetings of her ring team.
       Even as a graduate student, Dr. Goldreich recalled, Dr. 
     Porco ``was making a deliberate effort to become tough, and 
     she succeeded.''
       Dr. Porco found an ally and friend in Carl Sagan, the 
     Cornell astronomer, author and a charter member of the 
     Voyager team, who defended her once when her Voyager 
     colleagues teased her about not being married.
       Dr. Porco was subsequently hired as a consultant for the 
     movie ``Contact,'' based on Sagan's novel about a feisty 
     astronomer, Ellie Arroway, who discovers a signal from 
     extraterrestrials.
       Although plans fell through for Dr. Porco to meet Jodie 
     Foster, the actress who played Arroway, she did attend a 
     workshop on the script, where she took strong exception to an 
     idea that the character would sleep with her adviser. ``She's 
     a let-it-ripper, isn't she?'' recalled the movie's producer, 
     Lynda Obst. ``She let it rip.''
       Voyager, Dr. Porco said, was the time of her life. ``It had 
     all the elements of Homeric legend,'' she said. ``It was a 
     long 12-year odyssey, punctuated by brief episodes of great 
     discovery and conquest. And then it was back in the boat, 
     oars in the water, until years later we reached our next port 
     of call. It was a defining experience for many of us, and 
     certainly for me.''
       The chance to channel Dr. Porco's inner Captain Kirk 
     continued with the $3.4 billion Cassini mission, which was 
     launched on a roundabout course toward Saturn in 1997 and 
     arrived in 2004. Being on the imaging team is like standing 
     on the bridge of the spaceship, she said. ``We have the 
     windows,'' she said. ``That's what we're responsible for.''
       Dr. Porco was chosen over more senior astronomers to head 
     the Cassini camera team in 1990, one of 12 team leaders for 
     the spacecraft. The job swallowed her life, she said, and 
     required her hard-won toughness. ``Our experiment has been 
     spectacularly successful,'' she said, ``and that would never 
     have happened if I let people roll over me.''
       But Dr. Porco said it had all been worthwhile. ``Between my 
     participation in Voyager and my role in Cassini,'' she said, 
     ``when comes the time, I will die a happy and gratified 
     woman.''
       One of the most thrilling Cassini moments was in 2004 when 
     the Huygens probe detached from Cassini and landed on 
     Saturn's largest moon, Titan, a strange, frigid world where 
     rocks are made of ice, and rivers and oceans are formed of 
     what Dr. Porco has described as ``paint thinner.''
       Last month, astronomers announced that they had detected 
     methane storms on Titan, a cloudy moon that has an atmosphere 
     denser than that of Earth.
       They also discovered plumes erupting from the south pole of 
     another Saturn moon, Enceladus, suggesting the presence of 
     underground water and prompting talk about a future mission 
     to cruise through the plumes. ``Should we ever discover that 
     life has arisen twice,'' Dr. Porco said, ``that would be a 
     game-changer.''
       The Titan landing, Dr. Porco said in a talk in 2007, should 
     have been celebrated with parades in every major city.
       That talk led to another movie adventure. J. J. Abrams, the 
     producer of the television series ``Lost,'' was listening and 
     asked Dr. Porco to consult on his ``Star Trek'' movie. On a 
     visit to the set, she suggested that a scene in which the 
     Starship Enterprise materialized inside clouds be set on 
     Titan. The scene made it onto the cover of Cinefex, a 
     magazine about special effects in films.
       In an interview, Mr. Abrams said: ``She helped us feel 
     connected to what Gene Roddenberry had been trying to do. 
     This is our future,'' referring the creator of ``Star Trek.''
       Cassini endures, and Dr. Porco is a member of the team for 
     the New Horizons spacecraft, which is scheduled to arrive at 
     Pluto in 2015. But she said she hoped to spend more of her 
     time popularizing science and hopes to write a book about 
     Cassini.
       ``To my mind,'' Dr. Porco said, ``most people go through 
     life recoiling from its best

[[Page S9928]]

     parts. They miss the enrichment that just a basic knowledge 
     of the physical world can bring to the most ordinary 
     experiences. It's like there's a pulsating, hidden world, 
     governed by ancient laws and principles, underlying 
     everything around us--from the movements of electrical 
     charges to the motions of the planets--and most people are 
     completely unaware of it.
       ``To me, that's a shame.''

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