Stone took the initiative to adapt the peer review process to the faster pace of the mission’s planetary encounters: early in the afternoon, once the data was in, teams of scientists would decide what They thought they were their best results for the day and were waiting. their conclusions for return to the entire scientific steering group.
Based on this discussion, Stone would choose the most interesting results to present to the media and public the next morning. The scientists would then refine their presentations that evening and even overnight – Stone often pressing them to come up with analogies that would make the material more accessible to a lay audience – while a graphics team worked to gather supporting images. After the press conference the next morning, the process would start again. This cycle could continue daily for the duration of each planetary encounter.
“It was a very exciting time, and everyone was making discoveries,” said Stamatios “Tom” Krimigis of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, who is the principal investigator of the Low Energy Charged Particle Instrument. Traveling since mission launch. “Ed’s approach showed us how much the public actually cared about what Voyager was doing, but it also resulted in better science. It takes more than one piece of information to paint a picture, and hearing other scientists’ data helped us interpret our own.
It’s a process that continued to serve the Voyager team well in 2012 and 2013, as they debated whether or not Voyager 1 had exited the heliosphere and entered interstellar space. Some signs pointed to a new environment, but one key marker – the direction of the magnetic field lines around Voyager – had not changed as significantly as scientists expected.
The team remained perplexed for months until Voyager 1’s plasma wave instrument detected a much denser plasma environment around the spacecraft – the result of a chance explosion of material from the Sun that makes the plasma around Voyager 1 ring like a bell. Stone assembled the team.
“No one could wait to go to interstellar space, but we wanted to get it right,” said Suzanne Dodd, who is Voyager project manager, overseeing the JPL engineering team since 2010. “We knew that there would be people who disagreed so Ed wanted to understand the whole story and the assumptions people were making. He did a good job of listening to everyone and letting them participate in the dialogue. without anyone monopolizing him. Then he made a decision.”
Stone realized that scientists did not need to focus on the direction of magnetic field lines. They were a proxy for the plasma environment. The team concluded that the detection of the scientific plasma wave instrument provided a better analysis of the current plasma environment and was evidence of humanity’s arrival in interstellar space.
Leader of JPL
Voyager’s notoriety also raised Stone’s. In 1991, about two years after the mission completed its planetary flybys, Stone became director of JPL, serving until 2001. Under his leadership, JPL was responsible for more than two dozen missions and instruments. Highlights of Stone’s tenure include the landing of NASA’s Pathfinder mission with the first Mars rover, Sojourner, in 1996 and the launch of the NASA-ESA (European Space Agency) Cassini/Huygens mission in 1997. The first Saturn orbiter, Cassini, was a direct result of scientific science. questions that arose from Voyager’s two flybys, and it carried the only probe to ever land in the outer solar system (on Titan).
The 1990s saw a shift in national priorities following the Cold War, with significant reductions in NASA spending and defense budgets. Stone has restructured several missions so that they can fly under these tighter cost constraints, including overseeing an overhaul of the Spitzer Space Telescope’s cooling system so that it is more cost-effective and can still provide high-impact science and stunning infrared images of the universe.
Space travel
Edward Carroll Stone Jr. was born January 23, 1936 in Knoxville, Iowa. The eldest of Edward Carroll Stone Sr. and Ferne Elizabeth Stone’s two sons, he grew up in the nearby Burlington Mall.
Edward Stone Sr. was a construction superintendent who loved showing his son how to take things apart and put them back together: cars, radios, stereos. When young Stone was in middle school, the principal asked him to learn how to use the school’s 16mm film projector and quickly followed up by asking him to operate the school’s reel-to-reel tape recorder.
“I always wanted to know why something happens this way or that way,” Stone said in an interview about this career in 2018. “I wanted to understand and measure and observe.”
His first job was at a JC Penney department store, where he worked his way up from warehouse work to store clerk. He also earned money playing the French horn in the Burlington municipal marching band.
After high school, Stone enrolled at Burlington Junior College to study physics and then at the University of Chicago for graduate school. Shortly after its acceptance, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and the Space Age began.
“Space was a whole new field waiting to be discovered,” Stone recalled in 2018.
He joined a team at the university that was building scientific instruments to launch into space. The first he designed was aboard Discoverer 36, a since-declassified spy satellite launched in 1961 that took photographs of Earth from space as part of the Corona program. Stone’s instrument, which measured energetic particles from the Sun, helped scientists understand why solar radiation was clouding the film and ultimately improved their understanding of Van Allen belts, energetic particles trapped in Earth’s magnetic field.
In 1964, Stone joined Caltech as a postdoctoral fellow, directing the university’s Space Radiation Lab with Robbie Vogt, who had been a colleague in Chicago. They worked closely on a number of NASA satellite missions, studying galactic cosmic rays and solar energetic particles. In 1972, Vogt recommended Stone to the leadership of JPL for the position of Voyager project scientist, which he held for 50 years.
Of Stone’s many awards, the National Medal of Science awarded by President George HW Bush is the most significant. In 2019, he won the $1.2 million Shaw Prize in Astronomy for his leadership of the Voyager project, which, as the citation notes, “has transformed over the past four decades our understanding of the four giant planets and giant planets. outer solar system and has now begun to explore interstellar space. He was also proud to have a college named after him in Burlington, Iowa, as a source of inspiration for young learners.