Between my participation in Voyager and my role in Cassini, when comes the time, I will die a happy and gratified woman.
The geysering on Enceladus is the most astonishing phenomenon we have in our solar system.
The Cassini mission was all about a comprehensive investigation of Saturn and everything in the Saturn system, and it's been a mission that's been done jointly with the Europeans.
I have a bias, and I don't deny that. But it's not so much an emotional attachment with objects that we study: it's a point of view based on the evidence. We simply know more about Enceladus.
There's nothing in this world like being the first to discover some fundamental fact of nature. It's profoundly satisfying.
In any 'big science' enterprise, like planetary exploration, where you must work in big teams of similarly driven people, it is important also to know how to work alongside others even when they may be your fiercest competitors.
I did play the guitar and sing; I was in a band called The Estrogens: three females and one very brave guy.
The reasons why images are so primal and people immediately relate to it is that we are exquisitely engineered to interpret information that is arrayed in two dimensions. That's our eyesight. That's how our eye-brain system works. So it immediately feels to us when we look at an image like we have extended our senses.
My whole entry into astronomy started from a spiritual place.
It's always snowing at the south pole of Enceladus.
I'm used to fighting and arguing with males.
The Saturn system is a rich planetary system. It offers mystery, scientific insight, and obviously splendour beyond compare, and the investigation of this system has enormous cosmic reach... just studying the rings alone, we stand to learn a lot about the discs of stars and gas that we call the spiral galaxies.
As far as I'm concerned, Enceladus has become the go-to place in our solar system for issues bearing on extraterrestrial life. It's a great place to examine extraterrestrial organic chemistry that is water-based and, therefore, like biotic chemistry on Earth.
People gravitate to religion to feel a connection to the underlying meaning of everything. Well, as a scientist, you're always looking for the underlying meaning, and that, to me, is such a spiritual life, I wish people would open themselves up to that wonder.
By the time I finished high school, I knew I wanted to become an astronomer. By the time I finished college, I knew I wanted to be part of the American space program. And that's exactly what I did.
It would be impossible in a few words to describe all that we've found with Cassini. No mission has ever gone as deep for as long on a planetary system as rich as Saturn's.
It's like there's a pulsating, hidden world, governed by ancient laws and principles, underlying everything around us - from the movements of electrical charges to the motions of the planets - and most people are completely unaware of it. To me, that's a shame.
Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and, until Cassini had arrived, there was the largest single expanse of unexplored terrain that we had remaining in our solar system.
For me, it was my first cosmic connection, on par with a first kiss. No other planet looks as unworldly or surreal as Saturn. When you see it floating in the eyepiece of your telescope, you feel as if you've uncovered mystery in the cosmos.
Scientists tend to come in two stripes: those who have tremendous appetite and aptitude for the details, and those who illuminate the big picture. Sagan was definitely in the latter category, and he was profoundly good at it. He made connections that others did not have the intellectual breadth or courage to make.
