Madame Saturn: A Conversation with Carolyn Porco (Part 1)

Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about exploring space with planetary scientist Carolyn Porco, aka Madame Saturn, leader of the Cassini Imaging Science team.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Chuck, you like my James Earl Jones invitation?

• 0:25Speaker 01

  I like it.

• 0:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I taught him everything he knows.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  This is what he told me. I just got off the phone with him and he was like, "How's Neil?" You know, he taught me everything.

• 0:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know. I got Chuck Nice in studio with me. Chuck, always good to have you.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Good to be here.

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for doing this. We've got one of my favorite people in the world. There's a friend and colleague, Carolyn Porco.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I call her Madame Saturn because she's head of NASA's imaging team for the Cassini mission to Saturn.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so she's in charge, all the beautiful images you ever seen of Saturn in the last 10 years, they came out of her lap.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know. I know. How could you not do it? And so, you know, Cassini mission was launched in 1997 and Saturn is a long way away. It took seven years to get there.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, finally pulled into orbit and a lot of things happened on that mission. It had a little probe that it dropped off of itself and plunked down on what is Saturn's moon, Titan, which is one of the few places in the solar system that has an atmosphere.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's a moon because our moon don't have an atmosphere.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Titan's got an atmosphere. This probe went down there and it saw mountains and valleys and rivers and lakes, but the lakes were not made of water. They were made of liquefied methane. That's how cold it is. Methane, the gas that comes out of your stove that you light.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  It freezes.

• 1:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It liquefies.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Liquefies. It's an alien landscape. And you know, that missions will go clear through 2017 and then guess what they're going to do with it?

• 1:56Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can't bring it back.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  So what are they going to do?

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just leave it?

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Is that what we did?

• 2:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plunk it down in the atmosphere.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Just let it go.

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're still talking about it, but we'll figure it out when we get closer to the time.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  That's how aliens will know where we have been. All of our stuff is sitting up on blocks.

• 2:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Saturday, it'll be the toilet bowl of, of missions that have been there. So let's, let's go to my first clip with Carolyn Porco. She came to my office, I interviewed her and find out just where she coming from, where she been, where she going, let's check it out.

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Carolyn, you're a native New Yorker, I understand.

• 2:34Carolyn Porco?

  I am, I come from the Bronx where you do.

• 2:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Bronx.

• 2:37Carolyn Porco?

  The Bronx, yes.

• 2:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what part of the Bronx?

• 2:39Carolyn Porco?

  The northeast part, Pelham Bay.

• 2:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pelham Bay, cool. So your first night sky would have been the same as my first night sky.

• 2:45Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, I have a story, I think like yours about the night sky.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Hayden Planetarium?

• 2:49Carolyn Porco?

  No, well, I have a story that starts with me waiting for the bus, Westchester Square in the Bronx. I used to work in a library and I'd have to catch the bus at Westchester Square and I just remember looking up and seeing like one or two bright stars, probably one of them was Jupiter. And like everybody else in New York, I had the same experience going to the Hayden that I guess apparently you did.

• 3:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, is that the real universe or not?

• 3:13Carolyn Porco?

  Right, yeah.

• 3:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how early did you know you wanted to do this?

• 3:17Carolyn Porco?

  So I got into astronomy the back door. I was attracted more from my spiritual questioning when I was just a young teenager. I was like 13 going on 80 and I was thinking things like, what am I doing here? What is the meaning of life? You know, I was probably very depressed, that's probably why I was thinking these things.

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you had existential angst at age 13?

• 3:39Carolyn Porco?

  I had enormous existential angst.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is the beginning of a troubled teenage.

• 3:43Carolyn Porco?

  I know, and I read about Hinduism, I read about Buddhism, I read about.

• 3:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you were totally messed up?

• 3:50Carolyn Porco?

  I was totally messed up. I even for a while got very, very serious about my religion, Catholicism, and for a period about four months, I went to church like four times a week and I did all the indulgences.

• 4:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're still around 13?

• 4:03Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, and I thought that just didn't cut it for me. I even did read about existentialism and that was really depressing. But, you know, thinking about what is the meaning of life and, you know, who am I? Where am I? Got me thinking, all right, where am I? Well, you know, where is where?

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Beyond just being in the Bronx.

• 4:22Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, really.

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you ask anyone, you're in the Bronx right now, man.

• 4:24Carolyn Porco?

  The ultimate existential question, is there anything outside the Bronx? So I started reading about the universe and about galaxies and stars and so on, and that's how I became interested in astronomy.

• 4:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a first that I've ever heard.

• 4:39Carolyn Porco?

  But you know, most males, I don't know if this worked for you, most males seem to get interested in astronomy by doing things like grinding lenses and building telescopes. I was never a tinkerer, I was a seeker. That's how I described myself. I was a seeker. And I thought the answers to the question of the meaning of life, you know, lay in the universe.

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if this were a few thousand years ago, you could have been a prophet. Think about it, because if you're young and you're having these kinds of questions, most adults don't even think that way. So you would have been labeled as someone with a search for wisdom, and then you'd acquire it and share it with others.

• 5:12Carolyn Porco?

  And they probably would have like hung me for it.

• 5:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it burns you. You're a girl. They burn girls and they hang boys.

• 5:18Carolyn Porco?

  They hang boys, they burn girls.

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From the Bronx. Everybody from the Bronx got a story.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they got a story.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you know what? I think the Bronx puts out a good product.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  What does that even mean? I tell you, no. I don't know anything about the Bronx.

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But there's actually an existence proof that you can grow up in the city and fall in love with the night sky, though never having seen it for real at night.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is the value of a local planetarium, which in New York is the Hayden Planetarium.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 5:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Turns out, that's like...

• 5:51Speaker 01

  It's funny how similar your stories are.

• 5:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, minus the religion part and the existential angst part and the Buddhism part, and other than that, they're identical.

• 6:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, what are you saying?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Oh, that's so funny.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you just never know, as a kid, what they're gonna become. You want to keep the ground fertile.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The intellectual quest fertile. She's a seeker.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what that meant was, she wasn't gonna really land anywhere. She was always taking flight. She was always in search. So to have gone through these other philosophies meant there was a philosophy still waiting for her to find.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 6:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a beautiful thing.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  That is. I mean, well, you know, that's...

• 6:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You meant she wasn't home watching TV, right?

• 6:44Speaker 01

  She's an explorer.

• 6:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, watching the Beverly Hillbillies or whatever the hell else I was doing at the time. No, explorers are rare among us, the people who keep searching. You can be a spiritual, intellectual explorer, or you can be a physical explorer. These are the people who leave the cave and come back wiser with fruits from across the valley.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? And where the rest of us are like sitting back watching the Beverly Hills.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Yes. I love explorers because I am the person waiting for them to come back with the fruit from the valley. It's awesome.

• 7:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know, the question is, if the explorers are so highly revered, how come everyone is, why, where's that in the genetic makeup of human beings? How come everyone isn't an explorer?

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know why?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Why?

• 7:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because everyone who's not an explorer is back in the cave.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 7:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're back in the cave making babies while explorers out finding stuff. So, so, so there's an interesting sort of, sort of fact about that. But when the explorers come back, then everyone wants to make babies with the explorer, you see?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It plays both ways, but I'm just saying. When we come back, more of my interview with Carolyn Porco, Madam Saturn.

• 8:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, co-host Chuck Nice in the house.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 8:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tweeting at ChuckNiceComic.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I follow you.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  I follow you too.

• 8:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I laugh most of the time.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Most.

• 8:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just kidding.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Chuck, you got about a 280 batting average.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Not bad.

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we're featuring my interview with my friend and colleague Carolyn Porco, who is probably one of the world's experts on Saturn and what Saturn looks like and how Saturn behaves. Cause she was head of the NASA imaging team for Cassini, which is still there, still in orbit around Saturn.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 8:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rocking the boat. Oh my gosh. And have you seen some of these jokes? After the Beyonce song came out, if you want it, you gotta put a ring on it.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw a comic.

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a picture of Saturn and Jupiter and it says, "How Saturn got her ring."

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you want me, I need more than just you saying you love me.

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How Saturn, it was a ringless Saturn.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Ringless Saturn.

• 9:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, how Saturn got her ring.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  So Jupiter put a ring on it.

• 9:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put a ring on it, that's how you keep it. Uh, so Carolyn Porco has a fascinating background. She's a New Yorker. And, uh, let's find out about more about her academic trajectory.

• 9:35Carolyn Porco?

  I went to the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

• 9:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're still a hometown girl, basically, that's Long Island, yeah? So after that, you went to Caltech for graduate school?

• 9:44Carolyn Porco?

  I did, indeed.

• 9:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And focused on what topics?

• 9:46Carolyn Porco?

  Well, I went there because I was just told by the people who were my professors at the time, it was absolutely the best place I could possibly go. I didn't think I'd get in, but they encouraged me.

• 9:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The best place to go for your interests.

• 9:57Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, obviously. And I knew this much. I knew that I wanted to be a part of the American space program. I did not want to do stars and galaxies.

• 10:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't send ships to stars and galaxies. We send ships to planets.

• 10:10Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, that's right. Maybe someday. I don't know. Maybe they'll send you, Neil.

• 10:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not till I can assure that there's a budget to bring me back.

• 10:18Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so Caltech operates the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Mind you, this was in 1974. So the Apollo program, of course, had came and went.

• 10:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Apollo had just ended in 72.

• 10:32Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, 72. But we were sending spacecraft to other planets and I wanted to be part of that. So I was encouraged to apply to Caltech. I did. I got in and I went sight unseen. I find it remarkable. These days, it's de rigueur for parents to take their kids to various colleges to see which ones...

• 10:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Parade you around, yeah, to find out, yeah.

• 10:51Carolyn Porco?

  I just said, "Bye, guys." I got on a plane and went to Caltech. I'd never seen the place before. Yeah, and there I arrived in California.

• 10:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it did right by you, it seems.

• 10:59Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, yeah. I loved it. I loved it.

• 11:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, so tell me, in the 70s...

• 11:03Carolyn Porco?

  I mean, excuse me, I say I loved it. It was, you know, they say getting into Caltech is incredibly hard. Getting into Caltech is easy compared to getting out. It was very hard to get out. But anyway, I did it. I got my degree and got out.

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And PhD?

• 11:16Carolyn Porco?

  A PhD.

• 11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Right around then, they're planning for the Great Voyager planetary tour. Were you old enough and active enough to be a part of that?

• 11:26Carolyn Porco?

  I wasn't part of the planning, no, because I was just-

• 11:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Voyager was launched in 1977.

• 11:30Carolyn Porco?

  Seventy-seven. I was in graduate school when it got launched. I remember the excitement about it. And then I took a leave of absence because I was lost and trying to find my way. And by the time I came back, it was-

• 11:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So all that existential meanderings earlier resurfaced within you?

• 11:46Carolyn Porco?

  Well, kinda, yeah. I've been wrestling with this all my life.

• 11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Had I known, I would have been more sensitive to your needs.

• 11:53Carolyn Porco?

  Really, you need to be more sensitive.

• 11:58Carolyn Porco?

  But anyway, so there I am at Caltech, struggling along, intimidated so much because everyone there is so incredibly smart.

• 12:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Feynman would have been there at the time.

• 12:08Carolyn Porco?

  So here I was about to say-

• 12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

• 12:12Carolyn Porco?

  I see Richard Feynman walking around, talking to himself. That was a common scene at Caltech. He was so brilliant, he probably had no one else to talk to. So he was talking to himself, or you know, we'd be, you know, the cookies and tea before seminars. You'd see people milling around, having pleasantries. And Feynman would be on a blackboard, probably writing string theory or something. And I was so intimidated, and this is a regret of mine, so scared I didn't take a class from him. But anyway, so I took a leave of absence at one point. I was kinda lost. The project I was working on didn't go well. I went off to live in the mountains outside of Boulder. I lived in a cabin. I was chopping wood, believe it or not.

• 12:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa!

• 12:52Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, I was trying to live like an Orgo, hippie kind of person. Ten years too late.

• 12:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, seventies, that's a little late.

• 12:58Carolyn Porco?

  It's a little late, but there I was. And then I went back to Caltech because I just hated the thought that I had quit. And I went back and I got immediately involved in Voyager, and the rest was history. It's like I found myself-

• 13:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you needed that-

• 13:11Carolyn Porco?

  Hitching a ride on what I consider to be humankind's greatest scientific exploration.

• 13:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You needed that little excursion to find yourself again.

• 13:20Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And land, land your plane.

• 13:22Carolyn Porco?

  I brought my spacecraft in for a landing.

• 13:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me, land your spaceship.

• 13:26Carolyn Porco?

  So as a result of that, actually, I encourage people in two ways. I say it's probably good for people to take a break between either college and graduate school, maybe even between high school and college, just to go out and taste what the world is like before you, you know, you know how restrictive and

• 13:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everything.

• 13:43Carolyn Porco?

  constrictive academe can be.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all about rules.

• 13:46Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah.

• 13:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when you take a break, there are no rules.

• 13:48Carolyn Porco?

  But it's also an artificial environment academics is, even though I think it's special and I'm glad I was nurtured and raised in it, I think people need to see what the real world is like. And so that helped me.

• 14:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not everybody takes a straight path. Yeah, exactly. I mean, here she is, a PhD astrophysicist, and she was chopping wood in a cabin outside of Boulder, Colorado. An unlikely departure. For especially for a New Yorker from the Bronx. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So she was Most people who are using an axe in the Bronx are not chopping wood. I'm just saying. Don't you be talking about my home borough like that.

• 14:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I, I, I got people, you know? I know you do, and they have axes, and that's what scares me.

• 14:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, no, so she, she would get involved in Voyager, and Voyager is an extraordinary mission because what we knew at the time was here's a mission that we're going to send to more than one planet. Well, how do you do that? Because the planets are in different parts scattered around the galaxy. Right. But we were able to, we, I mean, my, my planetary brethren at the time, were able to calculate a trajectory for that spacecraft that could get gravity assists from one planet to another and visit most of the planets in the solar system by doing so without using any extra fuel. So when you say gravity assists, is that like a slingshot effect? What I mean is, if you try to go from planet to planet at will, that takes fuel. Right.

• 15:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is just a, it's a, it's a radio transmitting antenna and some scientific experiments. There's no engine pack on this thing. It's got some adjustment fuel, but that's about it. Okay. Once this thing is set into motion, it is a ballistic particle in the solar system. And what you want to do is aim it right so that it could slingshot around one planet. Come out in a direction where the next planet is. Right. And then slingshot around that planet and go to the third planet and the fourth planet. It's like planetary pinball. Planetary billiards. Nice. It's like a four cushion pool shot. Yeah, no, it was nice. It was sweet. It was sweet. It was Newton's laws of motion and gravity just rocking it.

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, yeah, so it's like a slingsh- it's a slingshot effect. Plus, by doing so, if you do it right, in the right direction, you can gain energy for having done so. And so, this is how you can make sure this thing just doesn't slow down and stop and fall back to earth. Right. And so, we built it, it was called the Grand Planetary Tour. The Grand Planetary Tour. Oh, it was a beautiful thing. Sounds like a sixties band. Grand Funk Railroad, and we're opening up with the Grand Planetary. I know, I love it. I love it. I mean, I love it when bands take on names like the Fifth Dimension, that's cool. We hadn't reached five dimensions yet, but they were there already. It was the sixties. Yes. You didn't, you didn't have access to dimensionality. I was gonna say, I know what got them there, too.

• 16:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the, in the Heineken, the first Heineken party commercial, where this guy walks in and he's dancing and plays with everyone as he walks through the crowd. Right. The band in the background is called the Asteroid Galaxy Tour. Sweet. Yeah, I know. I was loving it. Yeah, I had to tweet that. Yeah, the Asteroid Galaxy Tour. No, to, to combine asteroid and galaxy in the same phrase is a little not right, but does I, again, give them props for going there. I was gonna say, they're musicians.

• 17:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come on, let's give them a break. They're musicians. But, uh, it's great that, uh, for people just wondering, what does it take to become a scientist? It's not about how narrow and defined your trajectory is, it is how broad is your ambition? Right. And how open is your quest for knowledge? You too can take the Grand Planetary Tour. Yeah, and she did it, and she, well, she will learn in upcoming clips. Uh, how that played out. Okay. No, no, we'll find out. You are right now listening to StarTalk Radio. We're on the web, starTalkRadio.net. And we actually tweet at StarTalk Radio, and we're Facebook. StarTalk Radio. Thank you, Chuck.

• 17:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck catches on. Yeah, he did. He is trainable.

• 18:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll be right back.

• 18:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are back on StarTalk Radio. Chuck Nice across the table from me. Yes, sir. We're in Argo Sound Studios in New York City. Yes, we are. Yeah, yeah, that's cool. We got a lot of smiles through the window.

• 18:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got my interview with Carolyn Porco. She's a fellow astrophysicist, planetary scientist. We're finding what made her tick. Yeah. Because she's delivering us images of Saturn as head of the Cassini imaging team. And in her life's trajectory, we find out some of the people who had an influence on her, which includes Carl Sagan. Socker.

• 18:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I think that sometimes I think everybody's got a Carl Sagan. I have a Carl Sagan story. Yes, you do. Everybody's got a Carl Sagan story. Yeah, well, you know, he was a very influential person. Influential guy. That's kind of what it's all about. Let's find out what her Carl Sagan story is all about.

• 19:15Carolyn Porco?

  I was immediately drawn to Carl Sagan's shtick, if you will.

• 19:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me hear you say billions and billions.

• 19:21Carolyn Porco?

  Billions and billions. Well, I don't have to try to imitate Carl saying that because Carl never said that.

• 19:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he never said it.

• 19:27Carolyn Porco?

  So we can say it any way we want.

• 19:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Still, I'll give you a B+ on that.

• 19:31Carolyn Porco?

  Okay. Anyway, I don't know where you picked up with what Carl Sagan was doing, but I got completely hooked when I was an undergraduate and my professor, Tobias Owen, who was a colleague of Carl's, invited Carl to come and give a seminar in the spring of 1972 to talk about the just fresh results from the Mariner 9 mission, the first orbital mission of Mars. And in preparation for that, the assignment was to read the book Intelligent Life in the Universe. In fact, the name-

• 20:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which Carl Sagan co-authored.

• 20:02Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah.

• 20:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, that's a translation of the original Russian book written by, how do you pronounce her name?

• 20:07Carolyn Porco?

  Shlaski. Shlaski. It's very hard to say. There's a K in there where it shouldn't be. I don't know what they were thinking.

• 20:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those Russians, what do they know?

• 20:14Carolyn Porco?

  What do they know about consonants, really? Yes, but you know the genesis of that book. Sagan was very audacious as a young man. He took a book that was already written and spliced into it his own paragraphs and words and thoughts and then went to Shlaski and said, "Hey, what do you think of this?"

• 20:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's audacious, actually.

• 20:33Carolyn Porco?

  It was audacious, but the book, I was supposed to read like a chapter. We're gonna read the book over the whole semester or something. I stayed up all night and read that book because I felt entranced by it. I just was completely hooked, so.

• 20:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's one of the first books of its kind to be published.

• 20:48Carolyn Porco?

  Probably.

• 20:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A scientifically informed assessment of life in the universe.

• 20:53Carolyn Porco?

  Very, very precisely scientifically informed assessment of a topic that people always thought was so fluffy and science fictiony that serious scientists never paid attention to it. That was, I think, one of Carl's greatest contributions, was getting people, you know, to consider this topic in a serious fashion. Anyway, that's how I came to know of Carl.

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He came to embrace his whole mission statement, I guess.

• 21:16Carolyn Porco?

  I came to embrace his mission statement, but, I mean, I don't feel like in the course of what I've done, and I've done a lot of Carl Sagan-y type things, I don't ever feel like I'm copying him. I feel like I was drawn to his message because of the spiritual quest I told you I was on. I feel like Carl really tapped into, he kind of offered people the spirituality in science and the study of astronomy, don't you think?

• 21:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I agree 100%. It turned astronomy from a science into...

• 21:45Carolyn Porco?

  A humanities.

• 21:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, to humanities.

• 21:49Carolyn Porco?

  Really?

• 21:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, of course astronomy had that built-in potential because people look up and out into the universe. Anytime someone thinks of where their gods live, it's never under their feet.

• 22:01Carolyn Porco?

  Right, they don't look down, they look up.

• 22:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they look up.

• 22:03Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, and I wonder if that has to do with when we're children, you know, we look up at our parents. It might even be like a physiological thing.

• 22:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, interesting.

• 22:10Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, yeah, someone ought to do a thesis on that.

• 22:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Looking up, you look up to something bigger than you and more important than you.

• 22:16Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, you start out that way.

• 22:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, look up is even idiom, right? I look up to you, but you don't literally, if I'm taller than you, I'm not looking up to you. But we all know what that means.

• 22:26Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah.

• 22:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I hold you in high regard.

• 22:28Carolyn Porco?

  Right. We hold the universe in high regard because we have to look up to see it. I mean, if you had to look down to see the universe, it might have been a whole different.

• 22:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, a whole different, yeah. It would still be important.

• 22:37Carolyn Porco?

  Geophysics would have been the spiritual endeavor, but people don't think of digging into rocks as being a spiritual.

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other than geophysicists themselves.

• 22:45Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, they probably do.

• 22:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Oh, shout out to geophysicists.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that, yeah, so the spirit of the universe. So, so we lucked out, so we have the spirit up in the sky and without, and there are no spirits in the rocks. I think we just concluded that.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  No spirits in the rocks. That's a shame.

• 23:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why, you like rocks?

• 23:06Speaker 01

  I like rocks.

• 23:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you never told me that.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  I'm a big fan of rocks.

• 23:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You a rock collector?

• 23:10Speaker 01

  I, you know, I, for a little while, I had a little teeny rock collection.

• 23:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  For a little while.

• 23:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, that's cool.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got rocks in your, in your blood.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  And in my head.

• 23:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No rocks in your noggin. If there's rocks in it, it's your noggin.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 23:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but Carolyn speaks from the heart. I mean, I think you, we feel that when she talks, we, we sense it as she, we feel her, her, she still has a childlike enthusiasm.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 23:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For what she's talking about.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Very passionate and enthusiastic.

• 23:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you, you put, you know, three parts of that and four parts Carl Sagan, or two parts one, three parts the other, you got a whole, you got, you have a, a, you, you have the person who would be heir apparent to going to the most majestic planet and telling everyone about it.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 23:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a spiritual way.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Look at you waxing poetic about Carolyn. Very cool.

• 24:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know Saturn is mostly gas and if you, its, its density is less than that of water, so that it would actually float? If you, yeah.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  So, wait a minute.

• 24:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta go.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 24:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back.

• 24:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More StarTalk Radio in a moment.

• 24:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Co-hosting Chick Nye.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 24:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love having you, Chick.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  I love being here.

• 24:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got my interview with the planetary scientist, a friend and colleague, Carolyn Porca.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Yes, fascinating woman.

• 24:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did I leave you dangling at the break?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Yes, you did. And I, you, basically...

• 24:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't do that on purpose. We just ran out of time. I'm sorry.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  You hit me with the Saturn floats thing and...

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I thought everybody knew that. Nobody knows that.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  What do you mean by Saturn would float?

• 25:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, people say things are heavy or light. They don't really mean that when they talk about it, okay? Usually, they're really referencing the density of a thing.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 25:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yes, a watermelon is heavy, but it floats.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 25:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So Saturn is, the density is so low, because it has so much gas in it.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That any piece of it you scoop out, you know, if you scooped out an average piece, it would float on water.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 25:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when I was a kid, I wanted a rubber Saturn instead of a rubber ducky. Because I knew Saturn floated.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 25:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To play with in my tub, but no one made it. So, anyhow.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Get right on that.

• 25:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess, get top people, one of those.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Carolyn is, is head of the imaging team at Cassini. And let's find out, let's find out what that is. I want to know. Here she comes.

• 25:57Carolyn Porco?

  The pictures that we create...

• 25:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you're head of the imaging team.

• 26:00Carolyn Porco?

  I'm the head of the imaging team, and they are kick ass.

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fricking awesome. Especially because we never see Saturn from these extra angles that the spaceship gets, because the spaceship is orbiting the planet. And so, you're showing us pictures with Saturn eclipsing the sun. You've got to be on the backside of Saturn to see that.

• 26:18Carolyn Porco?

  I know. It's spectacular. I do want to say, though, that I have made it my calling to make our pictures, process them to be as beautiful as possible. I just went over the top with this, and no one had really gone through this kind of effort before. They're very, very beautiful. I'm proud of that. They're like my babies.

• 26:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, you realize, maybe you know the story. The idea of even putting a normal camera on a space probe was a controversial decision when it was first done back in the 1960s. The public doesn't really know that scientists don't really care about photographs. They want to measure something else. They want to measure the magnetic field or the polarization. They want to measure things that are not just what the thing looks like. So now you've raised this to high art, right?

• 27:02Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, I have. But a camera is just a telescope with a two-dimensional array of detectors. The detectors gather scientific information. Just the fact that we can composite it into a beautiful picture does not undermine the scientific utility of the information collected in that picture. So they are still scientifically useful. But it is true that in the very beginning of the space program, the first spacecraft to go to a planet, I'm not talking about our lunar missions, but the first spacecraft to go to a planet, I think was launched in 1962. It was the Mariner Two of Venus. And I'm told it was Carl Sagan who was arguing to put a camera on the instrument payload.

• 27:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was some combination of Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray.

• 27:48Carolyn Porco?

  I guess. I guess. I'm hearing now that Bruce Murray played a role in this, too.

• 27:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A former head of the Jet Propulsion Lab.

• 27:53Carolyn Porco?

  And a professor, former professor of mine.

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of geology.

• 27:57Carolyn Porco?

  At Caltech, yeah. And they, I guess, were arguing for the camera and the other people, the opposing side one, there was no camera on Mariner Two, but on every mission since.

• 28:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They put the idea on the table to be reckoned with on later missions.

• 28:10Carolyn Porco?

  Right. And the people who opposed it were just, in the end, shown to be ridiculous.

• 28:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They had up their butt.

• 28:16Carolyn Porco?

  They thought images were for kids. And it turned out that they have collected some of the most scientifically useful information.

• 28:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Images.

• 28:24Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah.

• 28:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. It turns out to have been that way.

• 28:27Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah. I did my thesis on, basically, on dynamics by measuring the positions of rings and so on in images.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 28:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you have it.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Who would, I mean, I, it's so weird that people would think that imaging

• 28:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of another planet, after you spent money to get there.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Right. Is not a good thing. Like, you know, it's like going on vacation without a camera. Who would, hey, let's go to Paris. Hey, did you bring any pictures? Ah, who the hell needs pictures?

• 28:58Speaker 01

  The hell do you mean they'll have pictures? I went to Paris. You know?

• 29:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll just tell people about it.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  So there's a, there's a skeletal looking structure that's kind of needle-like and it's, it's beautiful. You should see it. That's ridiculous.

• 29:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, every mission has had it since then. So, so, so we're good. There's a similar sort of parallel point. The Planetary Society, which is an organization founded by Carl Sagan and others, now headed by Bill Nye, by the way.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 29:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Planetary Society wanted to put a microphone on one of the missions to Mars. So Mars has blowing winds. You'd be able to hear what's going on. And there's been resistance to that.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Yeah. But these are extending our senses to another place.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, why not?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Why not? I mean, that's great.

• 29:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like I said, the people had their head up their butt, but she said, oh, they just weren't there. I mean, she was way more polite about it.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think you were right. Head up the butt.

• 29:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, more of my interview with planetary scientist, Madam Saturn, Carolyn Porco.

• 30:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Chuck Nice with me in studio here in New York City.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 30:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, love to have you here.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Always a pleasure.

• 30:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're like towards the end of my interview with planetary scientist Carolyn Porco. She visited me at the Hayden Planetarium, a little bit of a memory lane for her, being a Bronx native and having her first night sky, the same as my first night sky, the night sky of the Hayden Planetarium. And so I made sure to chat with her for about an hour while she visited. And she, she can't say enough about the Voyager spacecraft. After having visited all these planets on this gravitational multi-pool cushion trajectory.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It then left the solar system.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 31:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's find out what that's about.

• 31:07Carolyn Porco?

  I did think it was a momentous juncture. And it's symbolic. Okay, you're right. It's only hardware, but it's symbolic because, I mean, even the message it carries, all those pictures and sounds.

• 31:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And symbols matter.

• 31:21Carolyn Porco?

  Symbols matter. Symbols really, really matter. Think of myths. Myths are all built around symbols. And so this was so symbolic. And I wrote a little piece for, I think it was, I don't forget who it was, the BBC or something. And I said, "This event, a voyager's passage out of the influence of the sun and into interstellar space was like humanity's arrival at eternity's door."

• 31:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's beautiful. That's beautiful, because I kept thinking it was humanity just walking out the front door.

• 31:50Carolyn Porco?

  You're not into the symbolism of it?

• 31:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I am. I'm just thinking as creatively about it as you were. And so it was justifiably then a page one story with the New York Times.

• 31:59Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, of course. What really brings people along in understanding, or at least appreciating, what scientists do. The work that scientists do in teasing out the workings of nature, which is kind of like their fundamental job. And Carl knew this. He intuitively knew this, is to make them appreciate the symbolism in what scientists do and also the spiritual nourishment that it provides.

• 32:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so what it means, you have to embrace the fact that as you learn something new about the universe, you are enlightened in ways that go beyond just intellectual. You can be enlightened emotionally.

• 32:34Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, and I think therein lies this whole duality of, do you look at the immensity of the universe and the almost nonexistent scale of our little planet, and does it frighten you? Or do you feel empowered? Right? To me, and I'm guessing you too, the fact that we can even know anything about the universe, to me, is enormously empowering. So I don't look at the universe, either pictures, look at the galaxy, the Milky Way, and appreciate, which I think is one of the coolest experiences around, right? Looking at the Milky Way.

• 33:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let the listening audience know that she's gesturing with her hands upward and outward to the sky. Okay, go.

• 33:12Carolyn Porco?

  Let the listening audience know that I'm an Italian-American and I can't talk without my hands.

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 33:17Carolyn Porco?

  So, to look at the Milky Way and appreciate that you're looking edge-on to a disk that's enormous, that kind of thing, right? I mean, to me, it's empowering to know that. But so many people seem to say, "Oh, but I feel so insignificant." And I think science is completely empowering.

• 33:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, have you ever thought of starting a cult?

• 33:36Carolyn Porco?

  You mean, I'm not a cult already?

• 33:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if you keep this up, a cult is gonna come out of me. All the people who do feel lonely, small, you give them the universe, there's the Carolyn Porco cult.

• 33:49Carolyn Porco?

  Do you know that conference that both of us were at, the Beyond Belief Conference, where I said you ought to be the first reverend of our Church of Science?

• 33:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was 2006, on the campus of University of California, San Diego.

• 34:01Carolyn Porco?

  The Salk Institute.

• 34:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the Salk Institute.

• 34:03Carolyn Porco?

  Right, and I said that to the audience. I said that I thought you should be the first reverend of the Church of Science.

• 34:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 34:10Carolyn Porco?

  Really? We could start a movement. We could get you a good salary, a lot of perks.

• 34:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I need some robes.

• 34:16Carolyn Porco?

  Robes, a scepter.

• 34:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A scepter, oh my god!

• 34:20Carolyn Porco?

  No, no, no, a lightsaber.

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A lightsaber.

• 34:22Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, but anyway, where was I going with this?

• 34:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have no idea.

• 34:25Carolyn Porco?

  You know, you know those videos of us, all of us?

• 34:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it was a conference talking about, what does it mean to believe in something? And is it justified, is it not?

• 34:35Carolyn Porco?

  Is there God?

• 34:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What role does science play? What role does religion play in belief? And should they continue the way they are or change? Yeah, it was a workshop of maybe only 100 people.

• 34:44Carolyn Porco?

  Well, it was a workshop where we didn't actually do much, we never accomplished anything, but we talked a lot. And there were these YouTube videos, right? You have one, I have one. Well, some group took mine, because of what I said in it. And I said things like, we should start a church. It was kind of tongue-in-cheek. And they christened me Saint Carolyn.

• 35:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 35:06Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, isn't that amazing? I'm Saint now, in some kind of group, I don't know what they are, but I'm Saint Carolyn.

• 35:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it requires two miracles.

• 35:12Carolyn Porco?

  So not according to them.

• 35:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. They relaxed the modern requirements.

• 35:19Carolyn Porco?

  Really? They're dumbing it down.

• 35:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's Carol Porco. So she's totally living this spiritual boundary between science and the soul. Science and emotion.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science and insight into our place in the cosmos. And so she's surely a chip off of Carl Sagan's block, right there.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  I kinda like the idea of a church of science. That's all I'm saying. Cause I am all about not paying taxes.

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  That's, that's great.

• 35:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the wrong reason to be religious.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  That's true, but it's the best reason.

• 36:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but I think the people, once they see how spiritually fulfilling just thinking about the universe is, that can just bring them in, bring them into the room. And, and it has the added benefit of being sort of objectively verifiable.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  True.

• 36:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would distinguish it from any other endeavor in this universe. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. We gotta bring this to a close. Chuck, thanks for being on.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  My pleasure.

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, signing off, bidding you to keep looking up.