Ed Stone is a scientist who has guided NASA’s groundbreaking Voyager mission to exoplanets for 50 years and led jet propulsion as the first rover landed on Mars Laboratory (Jet Propulsion Laboratory). He is 88 years old.
Stone was a physicist working on the ground floor of space exploration, playing a leading role in NASA’s missions to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Discoveries made under his leadership revolutionized scientists’ understanding of the solar system and inspired human ambitions to explore distant worlds.
Carolyn Porco, who worked on imaging on the Voyager and Cassini missions at JPL, called Stone “a really sweet guy” who “was a project scientist The closest thing to perfection one can achieve”.
“When two science teams compete for some spacecraft resources, Ed has to decide between the two, and even the loser thinks, ‘Well, if this is Ed’s decision, then it must be The right answer,'” Porco said in an email Tuesday. “I was lucky enough to know Ed. Like many people today, I was deeply saddened to learn of his passing.
Stone was a 36-year-old physics professor at Caltech in 1972 when he was named chief scientist of an audacious program to launch a pair of spacecraft for the first time to explore the solar system’s four giant planets.
It was the opportunity of a lifetime, but he wasn’t sure he wanted the gig.
“I hesitated because I was still a fairly young professor at the time. There was still a lot of research I wanted to do,” he recalled 40 years later.
He accepted it anyway, and from the mission’s first encounter with Jupiter in 1979 to its final flyby of Neptune in 1989, Stone became the scientific face of the Voyager mission. He guided the scientific agenda and helped popular understanding of revolutionary images and data from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, as well as many fascinating moons.
Stone and his more than 200 scientific collaborators were the first to discover lightning on Jupiter and volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io. They discovered six never-before-seen moons around Saturn, evidence of the solar system’s largest ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa, and geysers on Neptune’s moon Triton.
“When we encounter these planets and their moons, we seem to be surprised everywhere we look,” Stone told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “We’re discovering things we never imagined. I have a clearer understanding of the environment that the Earth is in. I can close my eyes and still remember every part of it.
The Voyager 1 spacecraft became the first human-made object to reach interstellar space in 2012, followed in 2018 by Voyager 2.
Stone, who posed with a model of the Voyager spacecraft, said the discovery of volcanoes on Io was a highlight of the mission.
(NASA)
The two probes continue to send weekly communications to Earth from interstellar space. Stone will retire in 2022, the 50th anniversary of the mission.
“Part of Ed’s life was aboard the two Voyager spacecraft. His dedication and keen leadership were woven into the fabric of the Voyager mission,” said Linda S., who joined the mission in 1977 and succeeded him as project scientist. Linda Spilker said.
The Voyager mission was Stone’s crowning achievement, but it wasn’t his only one.
He is the principal investigator on nine NASA missions and a co-investigator on five others, including several satellites designed to study cosmic rays, solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field.
In 1991 he became director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Flintridge in La Canada, a position he held for ten years.
It was an era of cost-cutting at NASA, but Stone still successfully launched Galileo’s five-year mission to Jupiter and sent the Cassini spacecraft to Saturn. He was also at the helm of the agency when Mars Pathfinder delivered the Sojourner rover to the Red Planet. This marks the first time humans have brought a robot to the surface of another planet.
Throughout his tenure at JPL, Stone continued to work and teach at Caltech, even teaching freshman physics during Voyager’s long voyages between planets.
He also serves as Chairman of the California Association’s Board of Directors. Astronomy Research Center, responsible for the construction and operation of the WM Keck Observatory and its two 10-meter telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
Edward Carroll Stone Jr. was born in Iowa on January 23, 1936, and grew up in Burlington, where his father ran a small construction business and his mother ran the company’s books .
Stone, the eldest of two brothers, has been interested in science since he was a child. Under his father’s watchful eye, he learned how to disassemble and reassemble all kinds of technology, from radios to cars.
“I’ve always been interested in understanding why certain things are this way and not that way,” Stone tell the interviewer 2018. “I want to understand, measure and observe.”
After studying physics at Burlington Junior College, he earned his master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Chicago. Shortly after he began his graduate studies, news broke in 1957 that the former Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite.
“Just like that, because of the Cold War and our need to match Sputnik, a whole new field absolutely opened up,” he said.
Stone built a device to measure the intensity of the sun’s energetic particles above the atmosphere and flew into space aboard an Air Force satellite in 1961. However, this was still enough to show that the particles were less intense than expected.
Despite the transmitter failure, Stone said the project was exciting. “We are taking the first steps in a completely new area of research and exploration,” he said. “We were right from the beginning.”
In 1964, he joined Caltech and conducted more space experiments for NASA.
Stone’s area of particular interest is cosmic rays—high-speed atomic nuclei that may originate from explosions on the sun or violence beyond the solar system.
One of his cosmic ray experiments is listed as one of the 11 major Voyager experiments.
Photographed by Ed Stone in 2011, about a year before Voyager 1 entered interstellar space.
(Alseb/Los Angeles Times)
Colleagues praised Stone’s leadership of the Voyager science team.
“He was a great hero, a giant among humanity,” Porco said, adding that Stone was known for treating everyone with respect, from top scientists to graduate students.
Thomas Donahue, a scientist on the Voyager team, said: “Over the years, Ed Stone has proven to be very good at keeping a group of self-righteous people on track.”
Stone was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1984 and received the National Medal of Science from President George H.W. Bush in 1991 for his leadership of the Voyager mission. He won the Shaw Prize in Astronomy in 2019, with a prize of US$1.2 million. In 2012, his hometown of Burlington, Iowa, named its new city middle school after him.
“It’s truly an honor because it comes from the community where my journey of discovery began,” Stone Tell Local newspaper.
Decades after Voyager launched, he was asked to choose his favorite moment from the mission. He chose to discover volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io.
“It’s really shocking to find that the moon is 100 times more volcanically active than the entire Earth,” he said. “This is typical of what Voyager will do for the rest of its journey through the outer solar system.
“Time and time again, we find that nature is more creative than our models,” he said.
His wife Alice was whom he met on a blind date at the University of Chicago and married in 1962. died in December. The couple leaves behind two daughters, Susan Stone and Janet Stone, and two grandchildren.
