This article is about the Italian-born astronomer. For his French-born great-grandson, see Jean-Dominique Cassini.

Giovanni Domenico Cassini (June 8, 1625 – September 14, 1712) was an Italian/French mathematician, astronomer, engineer, and astrologer. Cassini, also known as Gian Domenico Cassini or Jean-Dominique Cassini, was born in Imperia, near Oneglia, at that time in the Republic of Genova.

Cassini was an astronomer at the Panzano Observatory, from 1648 to 1669. He was a professor of astronomy at the University of Bologna and became, in 1671, director of the Paris Observatory. He thoroughly adopted his new country, to the extent that he became interchangeably known as Jean-Dominique Cassini — although that is also the name of his great-grandson, Dominique, comte de Cassini.

Cassini was the first to observe four of Saturn's moons, which he called Sidera Lodoicea, including Iapetus, whose anomalous variations in brightness he correctly ascribed as being due to the presence of dark material on one hemisphere (now called Cassini regio in his honour). In addition he discovered the Cassini Division in the rings of Saturn (1675). He shares with Robert Hooke credit for the discovery of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter (ca. 1665). Around 1690, Cassini was the first to observe differential rotation within Jupiter's atmosphere.

Dr. Carolyn C. Porco (born March 6, 1953) is an American planetary scientist known for her work in the exploration of the outer solar system, beginning with her imaging work on the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s. She leads the imaging science team on the 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.

She has co-authored over 100 scientific papers on subjects ranging from the spectroscopy of Uranus and Neptune, the interstellar medium, the photometry of planetary rings, satellite/ring interactions, computer simulations of planetary rings, the thermal balance of Triton’s polar caps, heat flow in the interior of Jupiter, and a suite of results on the atmosphere, satellites, and rings of Saturn from the Cassini imaging experiment.

Porco was responsible for the epitaph and proposal to honor the late renowned planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker by sending his cremains to the Moon aboard the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1998.

Dr. Angioletta Coradini (born 1 July 1946, Rovereto, Italy – died 5 September 2011, Rome, Italy) was an Italian astrophysicist, planetary scientist and one of the most important figures in the space sciences in Italy.

In 1970 she completed a Masters degree in Physics at the University of Rome, the city where she would do her research over her entire career—at first at the university, then from 1975 at the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), and finally at the National Astrophysics Institute of Italy (INAF). Her early geological research conducted in the Gulf of Cagliari earned her notable international recognition, so much so that her “Department of Planetology” at CNR was one of the early groups to be entrusted by NASA with the analysis of lunar samples brought back to the Earth by the Apollo Program. From 2001-10, Dr. Coradini served as director of the Institute for the Physics of Interplanetary Space of INAF. She was awarded the David Bates Medal of the European Geophysical Union in 2007. In 2010 NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory named her one of its Distinguished Visiting Scientists.^{[citation needed]}