Back on February 11, CinemaSpy reported that the leader of the Imaging Science team on NASA'S Cassini mission to Saturn, Dr. Carolyn C. Porco, had accepted an invitation from producer/director J.J. Abrams to join the Star Trek XI production crew as a consultant on planetary science and imagery for the forthcoming feature film.

As Battlestar Galactica's science advisor and CinemaSpy's resident Cinema Boffin columnist, it seemed appropriate for yours truly to sit down with Dr. Porco and discuss her involvement with Star Trek XI, but to first give our readers a little taste of her real world responsibilities — responsibilities that would ultimately lead producer J.J. Abrams to determine that she was the ideal choice to ensure that Star Trek's astronomical imagery and planetary scenes look as realistic as possible.

Dr. Porco is currently a Sr. Research Scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, She is the Team Leader for the Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) instrument on the Cassini/Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan, as well as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. More biographical info on Carolyn can be found here.

Kevin: Given that you are the ISS Instrument Team Leader on the Cassini/Huygens Mission, why don’t you start by telling our readers what our relationship is.

Carolyn Porco: I am the leader of the team of scientists responsible for taking the high resolution images on Cassini. I’m also the person directing the imaging experiment operations center here at SSI in Boulder, Colorado. You are the person at JPL [NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory] who has been designated as the liaison between me and the Cassini Project personnel at JPL. So in that sense you are the person responsible for interpreting alien life for me. You are also the person responsible for producing calculations for us regarding the trajectory of the Cassini spacecraft to help us in our observation planning. So all told, I would say that makes me Kirk and you Spock.

Kevin: Fascinating. This also guarantees that I won’t be asking you any questions that will get my sorry [expletive deleted] fired.

Carolyn Porco: [Laughs] Not if you know what’s good for you!

Kevin: Let’s start by talking Cassini. Can you list for me, and of course elaborate upon, the most important observations your team’s instrument has made since arriving at Saturn.

Carolyn Porco: First we have returning something like 140,000 images of Saturn, its rings, and its moons since we’ve been in orbit and that is, for me, a legacy that I am enormously proud of. We have given everyone on planet Earth a tour of an alien planetary system that they, otherwise, would not have gotten. We truly have been explorers together in the Saturn system.



What our pictures have shown us are small-scale structures in the rings that tell us how at the small scale rings actually work. The rings are, of course, countless particles in orbit around Saturn, and we see "clumps" of them and aggregates of them that come and go. They’re dynamic structures and we are presently busy trying to understand the processes at work at the small scale. But we, at least now, have the information that can help us work out the physics of all those phenomena.



Also, our pictures were the first to see the sinuous channels and the lakes on Titan, which is something that we suspected might be on Titan before Cassini got there. We got hints of these in our early images of Titan, and those finding were beautifully confirmed by other instruments on Cassini in the years following. For example the RADAR instrument has collected now higher resolution images of the channels and the lakes. So that has been just a thrilling episode in Cassini’s exploration of Saturn—to see the slow reveal of the surface of Titan, which is a body that has a geological diversity on its surface that rivals Earth. So it’s like exploring, in some strange sense, Earth’s sister planet.



Then, of course, I think the MOST thrilling discovery we’ve made of all are the jets, the geysers, coming from the south pole of Enceladus.. This is also a phenomenon that we thought might exist before Cassini got there, but we never anticipated it would be as dramatic and as spectacular and as significant as it’s turned out to be.