Carolyn Porco is a planetary explorer & scientist known for her work on the Voyager mission during the 1980s and as the leader of the imaging team on the now-completed Cassini mission at Saturn. She has co-authored more than 125 scientific papers on a variety of subjects in planetary science and astronomy. Carolyn played instrumental roles in the taking of three iconic photographs of planet Earth from the outer solar system, including the 1990 Pale Blue Dot image of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, and the Day the Earth Smiled event, in which she invited the people of the world to ‘smile’ during the July 19, 2013 imaging of Earth from the Cassini spacecraft. She has won numerous honors for her contributions to science and the public sphere. In 1999, she was selected by the London Sunday Times as one of 18 scientific leaders of the 21st century. In 2012, she was named one of the 25 most influential people in space by Time magazine. In 2018, she was the inaugural recipient of National Geographic’s Eliza Scidmore Award for Outstanding Science Media. She was the character consultant on the 1997 film Contact, based on Carl Sagan’s novel, and the science consultant on Paramount Pictures’ 2009 reboot of Star Trek. She is a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley and a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx​