When I decided to participate in Ada Lovelace Day the first thing I decided what I wanted to do was to pick someone who was not hugely famous. So despite the fact that I have a chemistry degree, there would be no Marie Curie for me. Everyone knows about her. I wasn’t going to do Ada herself either, or Grace Hopper, despite my long career in software. I was tempted to write about Dona Bailey, who wrote my all-time favorite video game, Centipede, but around the time I heard about ADL I found out about someone else that I really ought to have known about long ago, and who I thought was just perfect for me.

For Christmas I had bought Kevin a bunch of DVDs (so as he’ll have something to keep him out of mischief until I can get back to California). One boxed set was an old BBC series called The Planets. We watched several episodes together in January, and I was particularly struck by the material on the Voyager mission. There was footage of a lady astronomer talking about some of the awesome things they had seen for the first time when examining the photos that Voyager sent back. Her name was Carolyn Porco, and she made her name studying the ringlets and spokes of Saturn’s ring systems using the Voyager data. I believe I remember her saying that she was also the first person to see photographic evidence of the volcanoes on Io, though I can’t find any Internet confirmation of that.

So I thought that Ms. Porco might be an interesting person to write about, and I went and Googled her name. Much to my surprise and delight, I discovered that she is also responsible for some of my favorite NASA achievements — the pictures of Titan sent back by the Huygens and Cassini probes. In fact she’s the head of the imaging team for the whole Cassini mission. She is also on the imaging team for the New Horizons mission that is headed for Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. As far as our knowledge of the outer planets and their moons go, Carolyn Porco is The Man. Or rather, The Woman.

I can’t emphasize enough just how successful the Cassini imaging team have been. There’s a world out there that in many ways looks just like ours. It has clouds and rain and rivers and lakes — maybe even a sea; but the “water” on Titan is actually liquid methane. Science fiction is forever imaging alien worlds, but the Cassini mission, and in particular the Huygens probe that actually landed on Titan, have shown us a real one.

The more research I did about Porco, the more I discovered that she isn’t just a great scientist; she’s a great communicator as well. She is someone that people turn to when they want the mysteries of space explained to them in language that they can understand. She’s also great at conveying the wonder of science — indeed, that very sensawunda that so many of us who grew up in the Space Age have felt, and which caused us to become science fiction fans.

Obviously at this point I should give an example, so here is a YouTube video of Porco talking about the Cassini mission at TED.

The question I then asked myself was, “is she interested in science fiction?” I’d seen her mention Jules Verne a couple of times, and the more I looked, the more connections I found. Here is the web site of the Cassini imaging division — the team that Porco headed. You’ll note the clever acronym title. You may also spot that the blog is titled “Captain’s Log”. And if you check out the art gallery section you’ll find that that the first paragraph mentions Chesley Bonestell.

Now what I really want to see at Worldcon is a panel on colonizing the outer planets with Carolyn Porco and Paul McAuley. I wonder if we could get Porco to Montreal? I suspect her diary is booked up way in advance. Maybe Reno in 2011.

It gets better. It turns out that Porco worked closely with Carl Sagan (on the Voyager project). She got to be Jodi Foster’s science consultant for the film Contact. And most recently she has been appointed science advisor for the new Star Trek movie. When you are a rock star astronomer, you get to do these things.

When I was first looking to go to university, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with my life. There were lots of areas of science I was interested in, and nothing I was particularly set on. One of the options, as I had good math skills, was astronomy. Of course at the time there were no famous women astronomers. Patrick Moore was the public face of the profession in the UK. Somehow the idea of swaning around the Caribbean with Jacques Cousteau managed to win out in my impressionable teenage brain. Nowadays, however, it is all very different. These days a young girl with math skills and an interest in science fiction can aspire to grow up to be Carolyn Porco. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a role model. And that’s what Ada Lovelace Day is all about.

You can find biographical information about Carolyn Porco at Space.com, Edge.org, and of course Wikipedia. Also of interest are interviews at Wired and TrekMovie.com.