Carolyn Porco
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"Carolyn C. Porco" is an American Planetary science/planetary scientist known for her work in the exploration of the outer solar system, beginning with her imaging work on the Voyager program/Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in the 1980s. She leads the imaging science team on the Cassini–Huygens/Cassini mission currently in orbit around Saturn.

She is also an imaging scientist on the New Horizons

mission launched to Pluto on January 19, 2006. She is an expert on planetary rings and the Saturnian moon, Enceladus (moon)/Enceladus.

More Carolyn Porco on Wikipedia.

Well, in some sense we should have expected, if the recent models are correct, to see them on the dark side where the photoelectron abundance is low. So, I was surprised to see them. But once they showed up, I realized we should have expected them there all along.

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Remember, Voyager was just a flyby, Cassini is in orbit. We have the opportunity for monitoring them and their behavior, their comings and goings, how they evolve, when they appear and disappear.

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We've been on the lookout for them since February, 2004. Spokes are one of those Saturn-system phenomena that we are keenly interested in understanding.

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We had convinced ourselves that conditions wouldn't be right for seeing spokes on the lit side of the rings until about 2007, ... But this finding seems to be telling us that conditions on the dark side of the rings are almost as good right now for seeing spokes.

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These are among the things we hope to learn. [The spokes] are obviously related to a host of processes…and may point to some important effects in understanding the magnetic field and the planet's magnetosphere, and how these systems interact with the rings and atmosphere.

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We have never seen anything like this before. There are spiral structures in the rings, there are gravity and density waves, but they are completely different things.

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Enceladus is surprisingly warm, internally fractured and active ...

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It felt like the old days, when we first saw the spokes. They are one weird phenomena and it was a joy to see them again…especially since we hadn't seen them yet and were eager to know why.

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