Edward Stone, 88, Physicist Who Oversaw Voyager Missions, Is Dead
He helped send the twin spacecraft on their way in 1977. Decades and billions of miles later, they are still probing — “Earth’s ambassadors to the stars,” as he put it.Edward C. Stone, the visionary physicist who dispatched NASA’s Voyager spacecraft to run rings around our solar system’s outer planets and, for the first time, to venture beyond to unravel interstellar mysteries, died on Sunday at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 88.His death was confirmed by his daughter Susan C. Stone.Inspired by the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957, while he was a college student, Dr. Stone went on to oversee the Voyager missions 20 years later for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which the California Institute of Technology manages for NASA.Twin aircraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched separately in the summer of 1977 from Cape Canaveral, Fla. Almost five decades later, they are continuing their journeys deep into space and still collecting data.Dr. Stone was the program’s chief project scientist for 50 years, starting in 1972, when he was a 36-year-old physics professor at Caltech. He became the public face of the project with the double launch in 1977.Dr. Stone in 1972 as a physics professor at Caltech. That year, he became chief project scientist of the Voyager program and held that post for 50 years, retiring in 2022.Caltech ArchivesTaking advantage of a gravitational convergence of four planets that occurs only once every 176 years, the spacecraft soared past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
