14 Carolyn Porco - Why Seeing Earth From Space Matters

Inquiring Minds

Science, Society & Culture, Neuroscience, Female Host, Interview, Social Sciences, Critical Thinking

4.4 • 848 Ratings

🗓️ 27 December 2013

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

On Valentine's Day 1990, from more than four billion miles away, the Voyager 1 spacecraft snapped our photo. From that distance, there wasn't much to see; the resulting shot simply showed several light beams with a tiny speck in one of them. Earth. But that didn't stop the late celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan from writing rapturously about the meaning of this image, which he famously dubbed the "Pale Blue Dot." "To me," Sagan wrote of the picture, "it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."Sagan infused the "Pale Blue Dot" with significance, but the truth is that, thanks in part to the difficulty of the shot, it was never a very good image. Enter planetary scientist Carolyn Porco, one of Sagan's scientific disciples and head of imaging science for the Cassini spacecraft, which is currently in orbit around Saturn and sending us back stunning images on a regular basis. "From day one," explains Porco, in this week’s episode, "I had it in my mind that I wanted to do that picture, only better. I wanted to make it beautiful." In our interview with Porco, she talks about the new Pale Blue Dot image she unveiled last month—appropriately enough, at a celebration for Sagan, dedicating his papers to the Library of Congress; and more broadly, why seeing Earth from space matters.This episode also features a discussion of the psychology of New Years' Eve: When do New Years' resolutions to lose weight actually work, and when do they fail? And what does marking time through significant dates (birthdays, anniversaries, and years' ends) do to the identities that we create for ourselves? Chris and Indre discuss the latest research on both topics.Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's Friday, December 27th, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.
0:05.9	I'm Chris Mooney.
0:06.8	And I'm Indrae Viscontas.
0:08.3	Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.
0:13.9	We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.
0:18.1	You can find us online at climatedust.org, and you can follow us on Twitter
0:21.8	at Inquiring Show and on Facebook at slash Inquiring Minds podcast.
0:32.5	So, Indrae, we talked on a prior show about how I attended this thing called the Carl Sagan Summit at the
0:40.2	Library of Congress. It was all about his legacy. One of the most amazing talks that I heard there was
0:45.8	by Carolyn Porco, and she's the woman who heads up the imaging science team for the Cassini spacecraft,
0:51.7	which is now in orbit around Saturn.
0:58.6	And so basically she's the woman behind those amazing pictures that you see on a regular basis of Saturn, its rings, its moons.
1:01.9	And at the Sagan Summit, what she talked about was how she had gotten the Cassini spacecraft
1:07.6	to take an amazing photo that updates the famous pale blue dot image
1:13.5	from the year 1990, taken of the Earth from Voyager spacecraft. And it was heavily publicized
1:19.1	by Carl Sagan in very lyrical form. And everybody kind of knows this picture. And so she took
1:25.4	another picture, or the Cassini took another picture of the Earth,
1:29.4	and it's a wonderful image that we're going to have online accompanying the show, but she did
1:33.2	it with a twist. And here's how she described to us in our interview what the picture was
1:38.8	like and how it was taken. It occurred to me somewhere along the line, you know, every time a spacecraft, a NASA spacecraft, turned to take a picture of the Earth,
1:49.2	and there have been many, actually, since the original pale blue dot, it was always taken
1:54.6	and then announced to the public afterwards, hey, here's this picture of the Earth.
	...

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