Stephen Colbert presents honor
from NASA to Voyager scientist
As if NASA’s Voyager mission
didn’t have enough firsts in its 36year journey, what with sending
the first spacecraft to Uranus, Neptune and, most recently, interstellar space! Now, it has another first
back here on Earth: on the December 3, 2013 episode of the Colbert
Report, host Stephen Colbert floated across the stage in a spacesuit
worthy of a1950s-era sci-fi movie
and presented Voyager Project
Scientist Ed Stone with a NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal.
The prestigious award honors Stone
for his work as project scientist of
the venerable Voyager spacecraft
since 1972.
“I was on the Colbert Report to
talk about what I think of as humankind’s greatest – and certainly most
extensive – journey of exploration,
and I certainly didn’t expect the
host to hand me an award,” said
Stone, a professor of physics at the
California Institute of Technology
and former director of NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif. “That surprise on my face was
real.”
The NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal is the highest honor for
a non-government individual. The
citation, put forth by NASA’s associate administrator for the Science
Galactic commander and talk show host Stephen “Tiberius” Colbert presented Ed Stone,
the project scientist of NASA’s Voyager mission, with a NASA Distinguished Public Service
Photo: K. Long
Medal. Stone was a guest on Colbert’s show on Dec. 3, 2013.
Mission Directorate, John Grunsfeld,
commended Stone “for a lifetime
of extraordinary scientific achievement and outstanding leadership
of space science missions, and for
his exemplary sharing of the exciting results with the public.”
Stone grew up in Burlington, Iowa,
and attended Burlington Junior College and the University of Chicago.
He was inspired to enter the fields of
planetary science and space exploration by the launch of Sputnik
Against the backdrop of an image of Saturn’s rings taken by NASA’s Voyager mission,
project scientist Ed Stone describes the 36-year journey of the two Voyager spacecraft.
Photo: K. Long
in 1957, and his career has spanned
the space age.
Stone has been a member of the
Caltech faculty since 1967. In 1972,
he became the Voyager project
scientist, and he has the distinction
of serving as Voyager’s one-andonly project scientist. He has seen
the two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and
2, through the planetary encounters of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and
Neptune and is now eagerly poring through the data coming back
from Voyager 1, now exploring interstellar space.
While serving as director of JPL
from 1991 to 2001, Stone oversaw
numerous NASA projects, such as
Galileo’s mission around Jupiter, the
laun