Edward C. Stone, Explorer. 1936-2024

Edward C. Stone, former director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and longtime project scientist of the Voyager mission, passed away on June 9, 2024. He was 88 years old. In this 2018 video, Stone talks about the Voyager 2 spacecraft reaching interstellar space, six years after Voyager 1 reached the same milestone. The twin Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977 on a five-year mission that is still operating today. Stone served as the mission’s project scientist for 50 years, from 1972 to 2022. In addition to his work on Voyager, Stone was the director of JPL from 1991 to 2001. Under his leadership, JPL was responsible for 21 missions and instruments and developed six new missions. Highlights during Stone’s tenure included landing NASA’s Pathfinder mission with the first Mars rover, Sojourner, in 1996 and launching the NASA-ESA (European Space Agency) Cassini/Huygens mission in 1997. The first Saturn orbiter, Cassini was a direct outgrowth of the scientific questions that arose from Voyager’s two