President George Bush presented the 1991 National Medal of Science to Dr. Edward C. Stone Jr., director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., today at a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden.
Stone was among more than 30 people who received either the National Medal of Science or the National Medal of Technology. He received the medal in the physical sciences category "for his outstanding leadership as project scientist for the Voyager space mission and his experiments in the outer solar system."
The ceremony was attended by Commerce Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher; D. Allan Bromley, assistant to the president for science and technology; and the President's Committee on the National Medal of Science. The presentation was followed later by a black-tie dinner in honor of the recipients at the State Department.
Stone became JPL's director on Jan. 1, 1991. From 1972 to the present, Stone has been the Voyager project scientist at JPL, participating in both hardware development and mission operations. He is also a vice president at the California Institute of Technology, which operates JPL under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Since the launch of the two Voyager spacecraft in 1977, Stone has coordinated the efforts of 11 teams of scientists in their investigations of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The Voyagers, after delivering spectacular images of the planets, will leave the solar system and enter interstellar space.
Overall Stone has been a principal investigator on nine NASA spacecraft and a co-investigator on nine others.
From 1983 to 1988, Stone served as chairman of Caltech's Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1984, he is the recipient of many scientific honors and awards, including the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, the Space Science Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the American Education Award of the American Association of School Administrators, and the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal.
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