[LINK] "An Odyssey From the Bronx to Saturn’s Rings"

[rfmcdonald]

Dennis Overbye's profile of Carolyn Porco, a Italian-American woman born in the Bronx who went on to lead one of NASA's most important space probe missions, is inspiring.

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 1960s 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.”

[. . .]

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 Technology, 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.