NASA/JPL · Public domain · Source
Also called: Edward C. Stone, Ed Stone
American physicist, project scientist of the Voyager mission for fifty years (1972–2022) and director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1991–2001)
Launched by the United States in 1977, the uncrewed probes Voyager 1 and 2 flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, giving the first close looks at them, then crossed the edge of the solar wind into interstellar space. Nearly fifty years on they still talk to Earth.
Voyager 1 passed Jupiter on 5 March 1979 and Voyager 2 on 9 July. They found erupting volcanoes on the moon Io — the first active volcanoes seen beyond the Earth — and Jupiter’s faint ring.
Voyager 1 passed Saturn and its moon Titan in November 1980, Voyager 2 passed Saturn in August 1981. The close look at Titan bent Voyager 1 up out of the plane of the planets, ending its planetary tour.
On 24 January 1986 Voyager 2 became the first — and so far the only — spacecraft to pass Uranus. It found ten new moons and two new rings.
On 25 August 1989 Voyager 2 passed 5,000 km above Neptune’s north pole, the first close look at the last of the big planets. On its moon Triton it found geysers erupting from under the ice.
On 25 August 2012 Voyager 1, 121 AU (18 billion km) from the Sun, became the first human-made object to cross the heliopause — the edge of the solar wind — into the space between the stars. Voyager 2 followed on 5 November 2018.
American aerospace engineer who, as a summer researcher at JPL in 1965, worked out that in the late 1970s the four outer planets would line up so that one spacecraft could visit them in turn — the Grand Tour
American astronomer and writer who led the making of the Voyager Golden Record and persuaded NASA to turn Voyager 1 around in 1990 to photograph the Earth from six billion kilometres — the Pale Blue Dot. Author of Cosmos
From Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, to Apollo 11’s first landing on the Moon, Apollo 13’s return from behind it and the Voyagers, which passed the outer planets and went on into interstellar space — the paths of the people and probes that left the Earth