His death Presenter He was Professor Emeritus of Physics at the California Institute of Technology. and Stone served as director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 10 years, beginning in 1991. His daughter, Susan Stone, said Stone’s health had been declining, but the cause of death was not yet known.
Dr Stone became interested in space after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the shiny metal ball that became the world’s first artificial satellite, when he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in 1957, and launched his career as a physicist at the dawn of the space age.
Over the next six decades, he designed some of the first scientific instruments for U.S. satellites, oversaw construction of the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, which boasted two of the world’s largest optical telescopes at the time when it was completed in the mid-1990s, and led the founding of LIGO, the billion-dollar physics experiment that in 2015 made the first direct observations of gravitational waves, ripples in space-time that have long eluded scientists.
He is best known for serving as project scientist and, informally, chief public affairs officer for Voyager 1 and 2. In 1977, five years after Dr. Stone was hired for the mission, the twin probes, launched two weeks apart, returned with fascinating photographs of the giant exoplanet and its moons, as well as a wealth of data about our solar system.
“We were on a mission of discovery,” he told The New York Times. 2002“But we didn’t expect to find so much,” he says, reflecting on the project’s beginnings.
Both spacecraft visited Jupiter and Saturn, while Voyager 2 headed to Uranus and Neptune thanks to a rare alignment of the outer planets that occurs once every 176 years. The one-ton probes have currently traveled farther into interstellar space than any other man-made object in the universe. Along with cameras and scientific instruments, each carries a bottled message from a celestial object. Gold Plated RecordConceived with the help of astronomer Carl Sagan, the satellite will carry sounds and images that will introduce potential extraterrestrials to the diversity of life on Earth.
“It was a great idea,” Dr. Stone told the Los Angeles Times in 2011, recalling that the recording was made as Voyager 1 was preparing to enter interstellar space. “But at the time we were just focused on getting to Saturn.”
Starting in 1979, the probes have taken the first close-up images of Jupiter’s moon Europa, revealing the cracked surface of a frozen world that, in Dr. Stone’s words, “looked like an ice block.” They have explored Saturn’s vast ring system, found evidence of a thick, organic-rich atmosphere on Saturn’s moon Titan, tracked 1,000-mile-per-hour wind gusts on the surface of Neptune, and spotted five-mile-high geysers erupting from the icy surface of Neptune’s largest moon, Triton.
One of the mission’s most startling early discoveries was the discovery of volcanism on Jupiter’s moon Io. It was the first time that active, ash-spewing volcanoes had been found outside Earth, and it surprised scientists who had thought the Moon was much like Earth: inert, cratered, cold and dead.
“Time and again we have found that nature is far more ingenious than our models,” Dr. Stone told an interviewer at Caltech.
As Voyager passed by the outer planets, Stone appeared on the evening news and was frequently interviewed. While overseeing 11 research teams and some 200 researchers, he was credited with accelerating the pace at which the team’s scientists published their findings, leading daily meetings to identify the group’s most interesting findings, and then working with the researchers to make the material understandable to the public.
“He was like a machine,” his former boss, Norman Haynes, who served as Voyager’s general project director for three years, told The New York Times. 1990“I wound him up and, boom! He was running around and doing his job all day.”
“We’re not sure what the Voyagers are up to,” astronomer Bradford A. Smith, who led the team that analyzed the Voyager photos, told the paper. 2002 Over the years, many scientists have hailed the Voyagers as “the most successful mission NASA has ever undertaken” because of the wealth of images and data returned by the spacecraft.
“Everything we know about the exoplanets is a direct result of Ed Stone’s contributions,” says A. Thomas Young, former director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. I once said“He was one of the two or three people who ran Voyager.”
The success of Voyager led to Stone becoming a household name and leading to his appointment as director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a renowned planetary science center run for NASA by the California Institute of Technology. Although the laboratory faced budget cuts in the aftermath of the Cold War, Stone worked on high-profile missions such as Mars Pathfinder, which landed the Sojourner rover on Mars in 1997, the spacecraft Galileo, which orbited Jupiter for eight years, and Cassini, which orbited Saturn for 13 years.
A tribute from the institute said Dr Stone was one of the few scientists to have worked on both Voyager, the mission that has traveled the furthest from the Sun, and Parker Solar Probe, the mission that has come closest to the Sun, which passed through the Sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona, in 2021.
“I always ask myself why people are so interested in space,” Dr. Stone told The New York Times before taking over as head of JPL. “After all, space is just fundamental science. The answer is that space gives us a sense of the future. When we stop discovering new things in the universe, our concept of the future changes. Space reminds us that there is still work to be done, that life will continue to evolve. Space gives us direction and it gives us the arrow of time.”
The eldest of two sons, Edward Carroll Stone, Jr., was born in Knoxville, Iowa, on January 23, 1936. He grew up in Burlington, Iowa, where his father ran a small construction company and his mother helped run it, and his parents encouraged his early interest in science, which included taking apart and reassembling transistor radios.
“I was always interested in knowing why something was the way it was, or why it wasn’t,” Dr. Stone recalled. “I wanted to understand it, measure it, observe it.”
After graduating from Burlington Junior College (now Southeastern Community College) in 1956, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he earned his master’s degree in 1959 and his doctorate in physics in 1964. By that time, he was married to Alice Wickliffe, a fellow student at the University of Chicago. Died in DecemberHe is survived by two daughters, Susan and Janet Stone, and two grandchildren.
After earning his doctorate, Stone helped launch the astrophysics program at California Institute of Technology with his former University of Chicago colleague, Rochas Robbie Vogt. He was appointed professor in 1976 and became chair of the physics, mathematics, and astronomy department at Caltech in the mid-1980s. Around that time, he began work on Project Keck, a complex of two 10-meter telescopes near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
His work on the project led him to support a proposal for an even larger observatory, the Thirty Meter Telescope, which scientists wanted to build nearby, but whose construction has been halted due to protests by Native Hawaiians and other critics who oppose development on the site.
Colleagues described Dr. Stone as shy and single-minded, with few interests outside of physics. “Work is my free time,” he would say. He continued to work on Voyager for decades, juggling teaching and research duties. 1991 National Medal of Science And that Shaw Award for Astronomy It is scheduled to begin its mission in 2019 and retire from the mission in 2022.
By then, the probes had traveled well beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto. Voyager 1, the more distant of the two, is now more than 15 billion miles from Earth and is still operational, although engineers have had to come up with workarounds for faulty computer chips and other communications problems. That craft and its twin will eventually run out of power, but the probes will “keep going forever,” drifting through space with their golden payload and silent instruments, Dr. Stone proudly said.
“I understand that what happens to me is just going to be nature’s way of taking its course,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “Even if I’m not there, we’ll continue to explore and we’ll continue to figure out the science. I’m optimistic about this.”