sHad Synnott never forgotten the day Ed Stone let him name a moon. It was 1980 and Synnott was a member of the ship’s navigation team. Traveler 1 It is Traveler 2 spacecraft, which had just reconnoitred Jupiter. Stone was the scientist for the Voyager project: NASA’s name is the head of the program. During the Voyagers’ close passage of the Jupiter system, one of the spacecraft captured an image – and then several images – of a small object rotating around the giant planet at a speed that made it complete more than one revolution each Earth day. Its size, speed and altitude could only mean it was a moon.
Even such an important discovery didn’t mean that people like Synnott had license to simply show up at Stone’s office, so the young engineer waited until the project chief took one of his frequent walking tours of Voyager’s bullpens, then approached him. and showed him a letter he was planning to send to the International Astronomical Union (IAU)—which catalogs new space objects and approves the name an object will have. Synnott handed Stone the one-paragraph communication and waited while the senior scientist read it.
“Do you know its orbital period?” Stone asked when he was finished, according to a conversation I had with Synnott when he was writing the book Journey Beyond Selene.
“About 18 hours,” Synnott replied, handing Stone a page of calculations.
“Your size?”
“About 60 miles.”
“Altitude?”
“One hundred and thirty-eight thousand miles.”
Stone reread the letter and then scanned the calculations again. “Well,” he said finally, with a smile, “it looks like you found a moon.”
Synnott smiled back, sent his letter to the IAU, and finally got a response, which included a list of mythological names he could choose for the moon. He settled in Thebea nymph of the Greek god Zeus and the Roman god Jupiter, and with that the solar system got a little bigger.
Stone-who died on June 9, 2024, aged 88 for undisclosed causes, after half a century as head of the Voyager program – could afford to be so generous with its moons. Their Voyagers would eventually discover 48 of them, orbiting the four gas giants – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – as well as previously unknown rings or partial rings around Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, and volcanoes on the Jovian moon Io. The Voyagers were launched in 1977 and are currently beyond the confines of the solar system itself, traveling in interstellar space – still doing science, still transmitting data, having outlived the man who birthed them, flew them and saw them for most of his life. great campaign, until his retirement in 2022.
“Ed Stone was a pioneer who dared powerful things in space. He was a dear friend to everyone who knew him and a dear mentor to me personally,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. in an official statement. “Ed took humanity on a planetary journey to our solar system and beyond, sending NASA where no spacecraft had gone before.”
It was in 1966 that NASA astronomers, studying the orbits of the four outer planets, discovered that 13 years later, in 1979, the worlds would form an orderly alignment, falling in a parade that occurs once every 176 years, which would allow a single ship – or, better yet, a couple of ships – to visit them all at once. That gave the space agency 11 years to invent, build and launch the ships — not to mention secure approval and funding for them in the first place. During the first six years of the project, things advanced only intermittently, and so, in 1972, the NASA program Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, who oversaw the mission, passed the reins of Voyager to Stone, then a 36-year-old physicist. It was a smart choice and a calculated bet.
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Stone joined Caltech, which co-manages JPL with NASA, in 1964, studying space radiation. He had worked on several NASA satellite missions, but had not yet held a leadership role. NASA bosses recognized his native intelligence, however; Even before joining Caltech, he collaborated with the Department of Defense to design a spy satellite that would photograph Earth and, as a research bonus, measure the solar wind—the stream of charged particles flowing from the Sun—helping determine why the photography and film on board the spacecraft were always blurred by energetic storms. This kind of talent was exactly what Voyager needed, but it was unknown whether Stone had the leadership skills to run the program. Turns out he did.
Stone helped secure funding and boost engineering for the Voyager project, particularly by repeatedly emphasizing to policymakers and engineers alike that if NASA didn’t take advantage of the planetary alignment now, it would have to wait until 2153 for its next one. outlet. Ultimately, both spacecraft would lift off on time, with Voyager 2 leaving the Florida launch pad first, on August 20, 1977and Voyager 1 – which was supposed to fly a little faster and on a slightly shorter trajectory and thus reach Jupiter first –on September 5, 1977.
Even so, there was no guarantee that NASA’s budget would support a visit to all four planets over more than 10 years, and officially, Jupiter and Saturn were the only worlds on both spacecraft’s itinerary. That being the case, Stone made the decision to, effectively, throw away one of his ships. When Voyager 1 reached Saturn, it changed its trajectory so that it passed under the ringed planet and then flew upward, putting it on course to make a close flyby of Saturn’s giant moon Titan, a world covered in a thick haze of organic methane and ethane that had long fascinated scientists. But once committed to that route, the spacecraft would not have enough fuel on board to reverse course and would therefore climb up and out of the plane of the solar system.
Voyager 2, which also passed by Jupiter and Saturn, would continue flying in the plane, capable of making close approaches to Uranus and Neptune if there was the will and budget to allow the missions. While Stone tended to his spacecraft, NASA bosses saved their budget, gaining funding to keep Voyager 2 flying. On January 28, 1986 – poignantly, the same day that the space shuttle Challenger exploded – Voyager 2 passed by Uranus, study the planet’s largest moons, while discovering 11 new ones and mapping their faint rings. On August 25, 1989, the spacecraft passed by Neptune, discovering two new moons, five thin rings and an Earth-sized bruise in the atmosphere known as the Great Dark Spot – a gigantic storm where winds reach 1,600 kilometers per hour. It also discovered icy geysers on the Neptunian moon Triton. Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to visit both worlds.
Still, Voyagers wasn’t finished—and neither was Stone. The spacecraft are powered by radiothermal generators, capable of providing energy for 50 years or more, and although transmitting back to Earth with a lower-power signal than a refrigerator light bulb, they could continue their work, accelerating to the limit of the solar radius. . system – and then exit. Voyager 1 entered interstellar space on August 25, 2012and now it’s more than 15 billion miles. (24 billion km) from Earth. Voyager 2 left the solar system on November 5, 2018and it’s more than 12.5 billion miles. (20 billion km) away. Both ships continue to whisper hoarsely to us.
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Stone would be distinguished by more than just the Voyagers. He was director of JPL from 1991 to 2001 and was in charge when the Sojourner spacecraft—the first Mars rover—landed on the Red Planet in 1997. Generalhe was principal investigator on nine NASA missions and co-investigator on five others.
It is for Voyagers, however, that he is best known. The ships carry golden discs – created by another lost space legend, carl sagan. If an alien civilization encountered the spacecraft and played the records on a simple record player – the state of the art on Earth at the time the spacecraft were launched – they would see 119 images of our planet, as well as hear greetings in 55 languages, and 27 selections. of music, including Javanese, Japanese, Chinese and Peruvian music; samples from Bach, Mozart and Beethoven; as well as “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry and “Melancholy Blues” by Louie Armstrong and his Hot Seven Band.
In 1978when the Voyagers were still new and Stone was still relatively young, Saturday Night Live announced that an alien civilization intercepted the ships, played the records and sent back a four-word message – one that would appear on a mock-up of that week’s TIME magazine cover, displayed by host Steve Martin. The four words were: “Send more Chuck Berry.”
History doesn’t record whether Ed Stone was watching that night, but as time passed, he probably saw the sketch and laughed. And then he went back to work. The Voyagers were still flying, which meant he was still working. He continued like this for most of the last two years of his life. Now, his ships – interstellar emissaries of the human species – sail without him. Good luck, Ed Stone.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
