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Edward C. Stone, 1936-2024
Caltech mourns the loss of Edward C. Stone, leader of humanity’s first foray into interstellar space.
While in that role, he oversaw the establishment of the Laser-Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), which, decades later, made the first direct detection of ripples in space and time called gravitational waves. "Our father was a construction superintendent who enjoyed learning new things and explaining how they worked," he wrote in an autobiography upon being awarded the 2019 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, a prestigious honor bestowed for his leadership in the Voyager project. They worked on a number of NASA satellite missions, including the Orbiting Geophysical Observatory and the Interplanetary Monitoring Program, which revealed details of how the elements are made from galactic cosmic rays and how particles from the Sun behave.
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