Boy, when you come to study something, and you come to understand it - you know, even if it's just a little discovery that you make, and you come to understand it on your own, it feels it's like the greatest high. It's like you just have found some incredibly secretive thing about nature.
It's so empowering to know the truth and to really understand something.
I was drawn to astronomy by a teenage existential quest. Around 13, I was deep into wondering about the meaning of life and what I was doing here. I turned to religion, but that did nothing for me. I got to wondering where was here. So, I began studying astronomy and became enthralled by what I learned.
I am uneasy about having scientific exploration depend on profit-making companies.
Cassini was so profoundly, scientifically successful. It's amazing to me, even, what we were able to do right up until the end.
Whenever we humans think that we might be approaching something that is vaguely similar to Earth, we get very excited about it. The prospect of something familiar but yet so distant and so strange is a very exciting combination.
The questions that we scientist have about Saturn's rings are the questions that an ordinary person might be moved to ask when first seeing them, you know. What caused them? How did they get there? How long have they been around? How long are they going to last?
Most of the solar system resides beyond the orbits of the asteroids. There is more to learn there about general planetary processes than on Mars.
Saturn itself is a giant planet, and there's much to be gained by investigating its meteorology and studying its magnetic field.
Even if the ocean on Enceladus starts out being as microbially poor as the pelagic ocean on Earth, which is the worst case, we still have a chance of seeing lots of organisms in the plumes.
'Carl Sagan: A Life,' though a riveting tale, tells as much about the all-too-human feelings of jealousy and resentment as it does about the individual who inspired them.
When the Voyager 2 spacecraft sped through the Saturnian system more than a quarter of a century ago, it came within 90,000 kilometers of the moon Enceladus. Over the course of a few hours, its cameras returned a handful of images that confounded planetary scientists for years.
Even by the diverse standards of Saturn's satellites, Enceladus was an outlier. Its icy surface was as white and bright as fresh snow, and whereas the other airless moons were heavily pocked with craters, Enceladus was mantled in places with extensive plains of smooth, uncratered terrain, a clear sign of past internally driven geologic activity.
No matter how you measure it, whether you measure the amount of mass or you measure the number of bodies, most of our solar system exists out beyond the orbits of the asteroids. So we could not have claimed to know our own solar system until Voyager had toured the giant planets.
The most exciting thing that we have found with Cassini is the geological activity, the geysering activity at the south pole of Enceladus.
The book that blew the doors off the house, grabbing me with its breathtakingly deep and irresistible view of the universe and our relation to it, was 'Intelligent Life in the Universe' by I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan. I recall an enchanting all-nighter completing a college homework assignment to read the first chapter.
The Huygens images were everything our images from orbit were not. Instead of hazy, sinuous features that we could only guess were streams and drainage channels, here was incontrovertible evidence that at some point in Titan's history - and perhaps even now - there were flowing liquid hydrocarbons on the surface.
We can have fun speculating about why things are the way they are but don't look to science to provide any answers.
Motive may be inferred only when the stimuli in the agent's environment are open to view and the influences leading an agent to a particular action can be evaluated.
Science is not the means by which we come to understand why physical laws and circumstances are the way they are. When we ask why - assuming the question is really 'why' and not 'how' - we are really asking to know the motive of some responsible agent capable of reason.
