Edward C. Stone

Edward Carroll Stone Jr. was an American space physicist who lived from January 23, 1936 to June 9, 2024, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology and director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1991 to 2001. He served as project scientist of the Voyager program for 50 years, from 1972 to 2022, overseeing its encounters with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and the discovery of active volcanism on Jupiter own moon Io, and both Voyager spacecraft crossed the heliopause into interstellar space under his direction, Voyager 1 becoming the first spacecraft to leave the Solar System in 2012. He received the National Medal of Science in 1991 and the 2019 Shaw Prize in Astronomy.