Ed Stone, head of the Voyager mission that introduced us to solar system’s outer planets, has died | CBC Radio

The NASA venture scientist who led the grandest and farthest tour humanity’s ever taken in our solar system has died. Ed Stone, the former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Voyager venture scientist, was 88 years previous when he died on June 9.

For 5 many years, Stone led the Voyager mission, the longest robotic house mission in historical past and one of the biggest journeys of discovery in trendy instances.

“How do you say goodbye to someone who helped make your destiny possible? Thank you, Ed, for opening the door for our celestial exploration. You will forever be remembered as your legacy lives on beyond the heliosphere,” NASA mentioned on its Voyager social media account, which is usually written in the point-of-view of the spacecraft itself.

I used to be lucky to witness the complete Voyager mission personally from launch by means of to the encounters with the 4 largest planets in our solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The twin spacecraft have been constructed and managed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., the place I made common pilgrimages over the 12 years that the encounters took. 

At each shut encounter with the big planets, Stone could be our information. He led each day press conferences to report on the well being of the spacecraft, give an outline of the occasions that had occurred that day and introduce the varied workforce leaders.

They would every present the newest photos or information from the spacecrafts’ radio observations of the planets, but additionally their moons that have been being seen up shut for the first time — some of which we did not even know existed till Voyager found them. It was only a style of the flood of information the Voyager spacecraft have been sending again.  

At every morning press convention, Stone was first to communicate. Like a toddler on Christmas morning, he would unwrap new images of alien landscapes which human eyes had by no means seen earlier than.

Both Voyagers spacecraft flew previous Jupiter in 1979 and over the rings of Saturn in 1980 and 1981. Then, Voyager 2 flew previous the sideways-spinning planet Uranus in 1986 and out to the blue orb of Neptune in 1989 — to date, it is the solely spacecraft to ever achieve this.

Now, greater than 20 billion kilometres from the solar, each spacecraft have reached interstellar house.

These visits have been transient flybys — the spacecraft did not cease at any vacation spot or go into orbit round a planet or land on the floor. They simply swept by like vacationers who by no means get off the bus, taking as many images and different measurements as doable earlier than heading off to the subsequent vacation spot.

Ed Stone first joined the Voyager mission in 1972 and remained chief till he retired in 2022. During that time he managed dozens of scientists engaged on totally different groups that operated the suite of devices aboard the spacecraft.  

During these transient flybys, which solely lasted a matter of days, conflicts would come up between the science groups over what the spacecraft would do throughout the restricted quantity of time accessible. Some wished to get photos of explicit moons whereas one other workforce most popular to measure magnetic fields or plasmas. Stone was the level-headed arbitrator and closing resolution maker, and his judgment helped make the Voyager mission a hit far past expectations.

Stone’s profession was not restricted to Voyager. He was director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1991 to 2001, and was half of 9 NASA missions together with Mars Pathfinder which carried Sojourner, the first rover to land on Mars; the Cassini mission that orbited Saturn; and the Parker Solar Probe that flew by means of the corona of the solar. 

Stone was additionally a professor at the California Institute of Technology which in 2023 established the endowed Edward C. Stone Professorship in his honour.  

When I interviewed him for Quirks & Quarks in 2017 on the fortieth anniversary of Voyager’s launch, and once more in 2019 when Voyager 2 reached interstellar house, his enthusiasm for the mission and his eloquence explaining it was undiminished.

I had hoped to communicate to him once more for the fiftieth anniversary of Voyagers launch in 2027. He will likely be deeply missed by the scientific group and journalists alike, to whom he was at all times accommodating. 

It has been an amazing honour to have been witness to this journey of pure discovery with Ed Stone at the helm.