Biography of Carolyn Porco

 She was on a rooftop in the Bronx, of all the unlikely places, peering through a friend's telescope when she caught her first glimpse of Saturn. It was a pivotal moment for Porco, now leader of the imaging team on the Cassini mission to the ringed world, as it was then where she discovered her life's passion.

Some astronomers fall in love with their craft by building their own telescopes, and only after they view the stars do they begin to be enraptured by the vastness of space. For Porco, it was the other way around.

"I wasn't a tinkerer, I was a thinker, a seeker," Porco said. "I got into astronomy through an interest in religion. I read about eastern philosophy and religion and existentialism. All that introspective thinking got me thinking about the great beyond. That turned my sights from inwards to outwards, and I started becoming interested in the makeup of the universe and I started reading about astronomy, planets, and galaxies."

By the time she was in high school she had developed a deep interest in astronomy. She saw the first images of Mars from the Mariner mission in the early '60's and knew that she wanted to explore planets. She went to the State University of New York in Stony Brook to do her undergraduate work in astronomy before going to California Institute of Technology, where she earned her doctorate.

While at Caltech, which runs NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Porco got her first real hands on experience exploring other planets.

"While I was there, Voyager flew by Saturn. I got involved with a person who was a member of the imaging team and started working on data from Saturn," said Porco in an interview with Space.com. "With all that data coming in, the imaging team didn't have enough hands or scientists to work on all of it."

Because of the lack of hands, a gem that would help define her career fell into Porco's lap. She was the first person to work on data from Saturn's eccentric ringlets and the "spokes" in the B ring, two projects she would do her dissertation on. As she progressed with her work on ringlets and "spokes", she discovered a connection between them and Saturn's magnetic field.

"I'll never forget when I realized there was this connection - it was tremendous to know something that no one else on the planet knew," said Porco, joking that she felt a bit like Galileo. "It was a "eureka" moment -- a time when you come to understand one of nature's secrets."

Because she understood this particular secret so well, she continued to contribute to the Voyager mission as the fly by images of Uranus, which has rings similar to Saturn's, were being gathered in 1986. As a member of the imaging team, she played a large role in planning the imaging sequences of the Uranian rings. By the time Voyager was passing Neptune in 1989, Porco was leading a small band of scientists interested in Neptunian rings on Voyager's imaging team.