"Surfing the shock" is one way to describe what the NASA Voyager mission will be doing as it reaches the edge of the solar wind's bubble around the sun. In a talk at 1:10 p.m., Tuesday, Edward Stone, former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a vice president and David Morrisroe Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, will discuss how the current Voyager observations of this interesting region of space vary from scientists' previous expectations.
Voyager 2 was launched first from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Aug. 20, 1977; Voyager 1 was launched on a faster, shorter trajectory on Sept. 5, 1977. Following their planet flybys, both Voyager spacecraft are heading out of the solar system. Flight controllers believe both spacecraft will continue to operate and send back valuable data until at least the year 2020. On Feb. 17, 1998, Voyager 1 passed the Pioneer 10 spacecraft to become the most distant human-made object in space.
The talk will be broadcast live on Labnet Channel 9 and available on desktop computers using Real Media and IPTV technology.
Since his first cosmic-ray experiments on the Discoverer satellites in 1961, Stone has been a principal investigator on nine NASA spacecraft missions and a co-investigator on five other NASA missions. As a co-investigator, he developed high resolution instruments for measuring the isotopic and elemental composition of energetic cosmic ray nuclei. Since 1972, he has served as the project scientist for the Voyager Mission and, following the launch in 1977 of the twin Voyager spacecraft, he coordinated the efforts of 11 teams of scientists in their studies of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Stone is the recipient of many distinguished awards, including the International Academy of Astronautics Von Karman Award for 2003, the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal (1986 and 1996); the Aviation Week and Space Technology Aerospace Laureate Award; the National Space Club Science Award; the American Philosophical Society Magellanic Award; the National Medal of Science Award from President Bush, the COSPAR Award for Outstanding Contribution to Space Science, and in 1996 an asteroid was named after him. Asteroid 5841, Stone, was discovered on Sept. 19, 1982 by Eleanor F. "Glo" Helin at Palomar Observatory near Pauma Valley, Calif. It has a period of 2 years, 245 days.
Stone has received honorary degrees from Washington University at St. Louis, Harvard University and the University of Chicago. He earned master's and doctoral degrees in physics from the University of Chicago. He is a member of the the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Geophysical Union. He also is an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), a member of the American Astronomical Society, the International Academy of Astronautics and the California Council on Science and Technology.
For more information about the Director's Colloquium program, which is coordinated by the Science and Technology Base (STB) Programs Office, go to http://stb.lanl.gov:8080/wosaserver/web?pg=/program/colloquium/index.xml online.
-- Nancy Ambrosiano