Carolyn Porco

My work is my life.

My whole entry into astronomy started from a spiritual place.

People gravitate to religion to feel a connection to the underlying meaning of everything. Well, as a scientist, you're always looking for the underlying meaning, and that, to me, is such a spiritual life, I wish people would open themselves up to that wonder.

Boy, when you come to study something, and you come to understand it - you know, even if it's just a little discovery that you make, and you come to understand it on your own, it feels it's like the greatest high. It's like you just have found some incredibly secretive thing about nature.

There's nothing in this world like being the first to discover some fundamental fact of nature. It's profoundly satisfying.

Let's teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome - and even comforting - than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.

I have a bias, and I don't deny that. But it's not so much an emotional attachment with objects that we study: it's a point of view based on the evidence. We simply know more about Enceladus.

Make education more accessible to women - all women, not just Americans.

Those of us engaged in the practice of science come to feel a certain reverence for it, engendered by its demonstrable power to dissect, clarify, and explain what previously was unexplainable, and thus to improve the human condition.

By the time I finished high school, I knew I wanted to become an astronomer. By the time I finished college, I knew I wanted to be part of the American space program. And that's exactly what I did.

Between my participation in Voyager and my role in Cassini, when comes the time, I will die a happy and gratified woman.

Cassini was an international undertaking, led by NASA and the European Space Agency and designed to be, in every dimension, a dramatic advance over Voyager. At the size of a school bus, it was bigger than Voyager and outfitted with the most sophisticated scientific instruments ever carried into the outer solar system.