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Jet Propulsion Laboratory Visitor Center

Visitors must register ahead of time.  See the webpage for details.

All tours are 2 to 2.5 hours in duration and commonly include a multi-media presentation, and seeing our array of models and Solar System gallery, including our full scale Voyager and Galileo spacecraft models.

Guests may also visit the von Karman Visitor Center, the Space Flight Operations Facility, and the Spacecraft Assembly Facility.

Explore JPL will return in 2025

Please know that in addition to “Explore JPL” there are many other ways to experience JPL including our JPL Virtual Tour , monthly von Karman lecture series or weekday JPL Tours . Keep up on the latest news about JPL’s adventures. You can also sign up for JPL’s accounts on Twitter, Instragram, Facebook and Flickr. And to take a ride along with our spacecraft, explore the larger universe, or check the pulse of planet Earth, download our interactive Eyes products.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

NASA Facility in Pasadena

JPL is a research, development, and flight center for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), it is operated and managed by Caltech . All of NASA's Mars rovers were designed and built at JPL; the campus houses the Space Flight Operations Facility , a control room which has monitored and controlled all interplanetary and deep space exploration for NASA and other international space agencies since 1963.

Mars Rover Video

JPL's Public Services Office offers free for groups and individuals on an advance reservation basis, tour reservations should be made at least a month in advance. Tours usually include a video entitled "Journey to the Planets and Beyond," that provides an overview of JPL and its accomplishments. Guests may also visit the von Karman Visitor Center; the Space Flight Operations Facility; and the Spacecraft Assembly Facility.

Visitor Identification

JPL requires that all U.S. citizens, 18 years of age or older, present official, government issued photo identification (driver's license or passport) before being allowed entry. All non-U.S. Citizens 18 years of age or older must present a passport or resident visa (green card) before being allowed entry. Individuals without proper identification will not be admitted to the laboratory.

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Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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Most Recent: Reviews ordered by most recent publish date in descending order.

Detailed Reviews: Reviews ordered by recency and descriptiveness of user-identified themes such as wait time, length of visit, general tips, and location information.

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Jet Propulsion Laboratory - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024)

Inside NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Our Look at the 'Center of the Universe'

When NASA's Mars Science Laboratory screamed through the Red Planet's atmosphere in a daring feat scientists later dubbed "7 minutes of terror," viewers around the world tuned in to watch.

No one could see the spacecraft during those tense moments; instead, the world studied the men and women in charge of the landing: the engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Far from stodgy, white-coated scientists, the personnel at the California-based facility boasted mohawks and piercings, along with their enthusiasm, at the successful landing, and unintentionally promoted the idea that rocket geeks can be cool.

Founded in the mid-1930s, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is nestled in California's San Gabriel Mountains. After several students at the nearby California Institute of Technology were involved in an accidental explosion on the campus, the school strongly suggested they search for a more isolated area to pursue their rocket-building experiments, according to the JPL history website. [ Mars Rover Curiosity's 7 Biggest Discoveries (So Far) ]

In the 1940s, the lab worked to develop rocket technology under the umbrella of the U.S. Army, and it kept its name as a nod to its origin when it joined the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at the end of the 1950s. Today, the lab develops many of the scientific payloads for NASA missions.

High security

JPL is located outside Los Angeles, in Pasadena. I gave my name to the guards at the campus entrance before pulling into the visitor parking lot. Another guard booth near the welcome center meant I couldn't take my own tour. (I had come as part of a press group, but JPL provides educational and public group tours as well.)

The institution is highly secure, and requires vetting before the tour. Our press group was met by Jia-Rui Cook and Mark Petrovich, two of JPL's media-relations folks. After everyone checked in, we walked through another checkpoint and boarded a bus to drive us around the expansive facility.

Building a spacecraft

Our first stop was the spacecraft assembly facility, where we were greeted by Ken Farley, project scientist for Mars 2020 . Through a glass panel, we looked into an enormous three-story room filled with various equipment. Oblivious to the observers, a handful of individuals dressed in clean room suits worked earnestly at various stations,  their faces, hands and feet all covered.

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According to Cook and Petrovich, the scientists were working on multiple projects, but the only one they could definitively identify was the heat shield for Mars 2020 , a giant disc covered with a protective silver blanket. The shield, a nearby table and several crates were all cordoned off, and signs read "Flight Hardware, Do Not Touch."

Next to the heat-shield hardware stood "Cleanroom Bob," a dummy covered in a clean room suit that fooled me into thinking he was real, until I realized he hadn't moved throughout the presentation. He serves as a model for tours when no one is working in the clean room, demonstrating how carefully the scientists and engineers must dress for their work assignments.

"Pokémon Go" meets space

Next, we visited the Earth Science Center. When most people think of NASA, they usually recall the agency's role in studying other planets in the solar system. But about a tenth of NASA's budget is spent studying our own pale blue dot . Jason Craig, who works on visualization at JPL, had several interesting computer applications about the Earth to show us.

First up was Eyes on the Earth, a downloadable program that reveals information about the planet, including sea level height, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, and ozone levels. The program provides a real-time glimpse of multiple NASA missions. The app also allows users to track any of the satellites observing Earth, including the smallest " cube satellites ," which can be as small as 10 cubic centimeters (0.6 cubic inches). Using the app, Craig took us on a tour of Earth.

A second program, called Eyes on the Solar System, allows users to check out missions around other worlds. With the app, users can check out new missions, such as OSIRIS-REx , or older ones, like Voyager 1 and 2 .

Both Eyes programs can only be downloaded on a computer, but the next app Craig showed us was made for smartphones. Known as Spacecraft 3D, the app works a lot like "Pokémon Go," though Craig was quick to point out that they were doing it long before people started using their phones to hunt for Pikachu. Instead of encouraging people to search for Japanese cartoon characters, Spacecraft 3D allows users take pictures with their favorite spacecraft by inserting a digital representation of the spacecraft into the phone's camera app. The app requires an augmented-reality target card that can be printed out from the JPL apps website .

My 15-year-old daughter and I had picked up a card from Craig the day before, at a conference we were attending. She spent an hour taking pictures in which the Curiosity rover appeared to be sitting around the hotel room and on her shoulder.

The programs, along with several others, are available on JPL's apps website.

The center of the universe

Our last stop on the tour was the Space Flight Operations Facility, home of the mission control center. Inside the lobby stood a monument to the famed "lucky peanuts," which have made their appearance at important junctures for JPL missions. In 1964, six robotic NASA missions had failed to reach the moon. For the seventh, Ranger 7, mission trajectory engineer Dick Wallace handed out peanuts to the people in mission control, to take off the edge, starting a new JPL tradition.

Our group passed through a set of security doors into the Charles Elachi mission control center. In a room to the left sat two rows of computer panels labeled based on their roles, such as "navigation" and "flight director." Next to each monitor sat a headset, ready to go. In the back corner, holding his own lucky peanuts, stood the Mars Science Laboratory "Mohawk Guy," Bobak Ferdowsi , in a cardboard cutout. Ferdowsi became a minor celebrity when his dramatic haircut drew the public's attention during the landing of the Mars Curiosity rover.

Jim McClure, manager of mission control, welcomed us inside and gave us an overview of the control room and the role it plays in JPL's missions. Then, we watched a video of the infamous " 7 minutes of terror " — when Curiosity was hurtling toward the Martian surface and no one knew if it would survive the fall.  

Through a set of glass windows, we saw the Deep Space Network command center. Data from all over the solar system streams into telescopes in California, Australia and Spain, and it's all managed in this little room in Pasadena.

The room itself is fairly dark, lit primarily by the glow of multiple banks of computers and several large screens overhead. It is overseen by at least five engineers, seven days a week.

According to McClure, four years ago, former JPL Director Charles Elachi was describing how the control center collects information from both inside and outside the solar system. "This must be the center of the universe!" Elachi reportedly said.

Now, a plaque on the floor of the room makes that title official. In a sunken glass box in the floor sits a seal. "JPL" is written boldly in the middle, encircled by the words "NASA" and "the California Institute of Technology." An "X" divides the seal into four wedges, with an image commemorating the various types of missions (telescopes, landers, orbiters and flybys) in each one. The words beneath the seal proclaim the spot to be "The Center of the Universe."

"We fly our nerd flags extremely high here at JPL — so high we have had four marriage proposals at the center of the universe," McClure said.

Fear of the infamous Los Angeles traffic motivates me to leave the tour early to make sure I don't miss my flight. But the high level of security meant I can't go back to my car alone. While Cook continues with the group, Petrovich escorts my daughter and me to the bus, where we ride back to the visitor parking. I convince him to stop above the famous Mars yard , where rovers are tested under Mars-like conditions, and I take a few pictures. Next time, I promise myself, I'll come back to this yard, and take a walk on Earth's Mars.

Follow Nola Taylor Redd on Twitter @NolaTRedd Facebook or Google+ . Follow us at @Spacedotcom , Facebook or Google+ . Originally published on Space.com .

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Nola Taylor Tillman is a contributing writer for Space.com. She loves all things space and astronomy-related, and enjoys the opportunity to learn more. She has a Bachelor’s degree in English and Astrophysics from Agnes Scott college and served as an intern at Sky & Telescope magazine. In her free time, she homeschools her four children. Follow her on Twitter at @NolaTRedd

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JPL Tour in Pasadena

JPL TOUR IN PASADENA

Last August, my children and I ventured out to Pasadena, CA for a tour of Jet Propulsion Laboratory with Julian Charter School.  A few months later, I set up a second tour of JPL for our homeschool organization.

JPL’s educational tours are designed for schools and educational groups of 20 people or more.  The tour is specifically geared for children in 3rd grade and up for comprehension of information.  However, we had younger children in our group and it was fine.

First, we saw a short multimedia presentation about JPL entitled “Journey to the Planets and Beyond,” which provides an overview of the Laboratory’s activities and accomplishments.

Next, we visited the von Karman Visitor Center, the Space Flight Operations Facility, and the Spacecraft Assembly Facility.

For your information, planning a field trip to JPL can be very time-consuming, but it is worth it!

Just make sure that everyone in your group is properly registered and brings ID with them the day of.

“JPL requires that all U.S. citizens, 18 years of age or older, present official, government issued photo identification (driver’s license or passport) before being allowed entry. All non-U.S. Citizens 18 years of age or older must present a passport or resident visa (green card) before being allowed entry.  Individuals without proper identification will not be admitted to the Laboratory.”

Here are my recommendations when planning a field trip to JPL:

1. Wear comfortable shoes.  The tour itself is .8 miles and involves a considerable amount of walking and stair climbing.

2. Wheelchair access can be accommodated with advance notice.

3. Dress for the weather.  In the summer, it is hot and dry.  In the winter, it can get a bit chilly since you are close to the mountains.

4. Bring water.

5. Cameras are permitted on the facility..

6. Babies are allowed as long as you can carry them.  I carried my then 3-year-old in a baby sling for some parts of the tour when she got tired.

7. All tours are conducted in English.

8. The tour lasts approximately 2 to 2.5 hours.

9. JPL tours are FREE to the public.

Beginning on August 4th, JPL will be accepting new reservations for tours in 2015.   I highly recommend that you sign up then, because JPL’s tours are very popular.  To make your reservation, please visit http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/tours/views/

In the meantime, encourage your children to build their own space mission compliments of  NASA .

Happy Field Tripping,

Disclosure: This is not a sponsored post.  All opinions are our own.  Images used by permission from Windi Eklund.

Erika Grediaga

Thursday 31st of July 2014

Once more, a wonderful tip! I will try and see if I can either get my daughter's school to to a field trip, or if I can get enough friends to sign up for a tour!

Yay JPL!! Awesome FT!!

Voyager 1 is back to life in interstellar space, but for how long?

NASA engineers have succeeded in breathing new life into Voyager 1 , the spacecraft launched in 1977 and once again communicating after it went silent seven months ago. But now comes another challenge: Keeping Voyager 1 scientifically useful for as long as possible as it probes a realm where no spacecraft has gone before .

Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2 , are treasured at NASA not only because they have sent home astonishing images of the outer planets, but also because in their dotage, they are still doing science that can’t be readily duplicated.

They are now in interstellar space , far beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto, with Voyager 1 a couple billion miles farther from Earth than Voyager 2. Both have passed the heliopause , where the “solar wind” of particles streaming from the sun terminates.

“They’re going someplace where we have nothing, we have no information,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said. “We don’t know anything about the interstellar medium. Is it a highly charged environment? Are there a lot of dust particles out there?”

Even as the Voyagers continue their journeys, engineers and scientists at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. are mourning the loss of Ed Stone, the scientist who guided the mission from 1972 until his retirement in 2022. Stone, a former director of JPL, died June 9 at the age of 88.

“It’s great. This is exploration. This is wonderful,” Stone told The Washington Post in 2013 when he and his colleagues determined that Voyager 1 had reached interstellar space.

Voyager 1 has four scientific instruments still operational in this extended phase of its mission, but it suddenly ceased sending intelligible data on Nov. 14. A “tiger team” of engineers at JPL spent the ensuing months identifying the problem — a malfunctioning computer chip — and restoring communication.

That laborious process is nearly complete. Data is coming from all four instruments, project scientist Linda Spilker said, though engineers are still checking to see whether data from two of the instruments is fully usable.

What no one can change, though, is the mortality of a spacecraft with a limited power supply. Voyager 1 is running on fumes, or, more precisely, on the dwindling power from the radioactive decay of plutonium.

The Voyagers have traveled so far from the sun they can’t rely on solar power and instead use a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. But an RTG doesn’t last forever. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 will eventually go silent as they continue to cruise the galaxy. NASA scientists and engineers are hoping Voyager 1 can keep sending data until at least Sept. 5, 2027, the 50th anniversary of its launch.

“At some point, we’ll have to start turning off the science instruments one by one,” Spilker said. “Once we’re out of power, then we can no longer keep the spacecraft pointed at the Earth. And so [the Voyagers] will then continue on as what I like to think of as our silent ambassadors.”

In a sense, this is all a bonus because the primary mission for the two Voyagers was the exploration of the outer planets. Both visited Jupiter and Saturn, and Voyager 2 went on to Uranus and Neptune in what was known as the “Grand Tour” of the outer solar system, enabled by a rare orbital arrangement of the planets. The Voyagers delivered spectacular close-up images of the outer planets, and the mission ranks among NASA’s greatest achievements.

The gravitational slingshot from the planetary encounters sent Voyager 1 out of the elliptical plane of the solar system and did the same to Voyager 2 in a different direction.

About four years ago, Voyager 1 encountered something unexpected — a phenomenon scientists have dubbed a pressure front. Jamie Rankin, deputy project scientist, said the instruments on the spacecraft picked up a sudden change in the magnetic field of the interstellar environment, as well as a sudden increase in the density of particles.

What exactly caused this change remains unknown. But NASA scientists are eager to get all the data flowing normally again to see whether the pressure front is still detectable.

“Is the pressure front still there; what is happening with it?” Melroy said.

Voyager 1 is heading toward the constellation Ophiuchus, according to NASA, and in about 38,000 years, it will come within 1.7 light-years of an unremarkable star near the Little Dipper. But although it will have long gone silent, it does carry the equivalent of a message in a bottle: the “Golden Record.”

The record was curated by a committee led by astronomer Carl Sagan and includes greetings in 55 languages, sounds of surf, wind and thunderstorms, a whale song and music ranging from Beethoven to Chuck Berry to a Navajo chant. The Golden Record is accompanied by instructions for playing it, should the spacecraft someday come into the hands of an intelligent species interested in finding out about life on Earth.

“The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space,” Sagan said.

But that advanced spacefaring civilization might not be an alien one, NASA scientists point out. It’s conceivable that the cosmic message in a bottle could be picked up someday by a human deep-space mission eager to examine a vintage spaceship.

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Jet propulsion laboratory – future missions.

Missions and instruments built or managed by JPL have visited every planet in our solar system and the sun and have entered interstellar space.

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An infrared space telescope designed to help advance NASA’s planetary defense efforts

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Ed Stone, Former Director of JPL and Voyager Project Scientist, Dies

Ed Stone, former director of JPL and project scientist for the Voyager mission, died on June 9, 2024. A friend, mentor, and colleague to many, he was known for his straightforward leadership and commitment to communicating with the public.

Known for his steady leadership, consensus building, and enthusiasm for engaging the public in science, Stone left a deep impact on the space community.

Edward C. Stone , former director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and longtime project scientist of the agency’s Voyager mission, died on June 9, 2024. He was age 88. He was preceded in death by his wife, Alice Stone, whom he met at the University of Chicago. They are survived by their two daughters, Susan and Janet Stone, and two grandsons.

Stone also served as the David Morrisroe professor of physics and vice provost for special projects at Caltech in Pasadena, California, which last year established a new faculty position, the Edward C. Stone Professorship .

Ed Stone, former director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and longtime project scientist of the Voyager mission, passed away on June 9, 2024. He was 88 years old. In this 2018 video, Stone talks about the Voyager 2 spacecraft reaching interstellar space, six years after Voyager 1 reached the same milestone.

“Ed Stone was a trailblazer who dared mighty things in space. He was a dear friend to all who knew him, and a cherished mentor to me personally,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Ed took humanity on a planetary tour of our solar system and beyond, sending NASA where no spacecraft had gone before. His legacy has left a tremendous and profound impact on NASA, the scientific community, and the world. My condolences to his family and everyone who loved him. Thank you, Ed, for everything.”

Stone served on nine NASA missions as either principal investigator or a science instrument lead, and on five others as a co-investigator (a key science instrument team member). These roles primarily involved studying energetic ions from the Sun and cosmic rays from the galaxy. He had the distinction of being one of the few scientists involved with both the mission that has come closest to the Sun ( NASA’s Parker Solar Probe ) and the one that has traveled farthest from it ( Voyager ).

“Ed will be remembered as an energetic leader and scientist who expanded our knowledge about the universe — from the Sun to the planets to distant stars — and sparked our collective imaginations about the mysteries and wonders of deep space,” said Laurie Leshin, JPL director and Caltech vice president. “Ed’s discoveries have fueled exploration of previously unseen corners of our solar system and will inspire future generations to reach new frontiers. He will be greatly missed and always remembered by the NASA, JPL, and Caltech communities and beyond.”

At the Helm of Voyager

Stone is best known for his work on NASA’s longest-running mission, Voyager, whose twin spacecraft launched in 1977 and are still exploring deep space today. He served as Voyager’s sole project scientist from 1972 until his retirement in 2022 . Under Stone’s leadership, the mission took advantage of a celestial alignment that occurs just once every 176 years to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. During their journeys, the spacecraft revealed the first active volcanoes beyond Earth, on Jupiter’s moon Io, and an atmosphere rich with organic molecules on Saturn’s moon Titan. Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to fly by Uranus and Neptune, revealing Uranus’ unusual tipped magnetic poles, and the icy geysers erupting from Neptune’s moon Triton.

Ed Stone became project scientist for the Voyager mission in 1972, five years before launch, and served in the role for a total of 50 years. During that time, he also served as director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the Voyager mission for the agency.

Now more than 15 billion miles (24 million kilometers) from Earth, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object. Voyager 2, traveling slightly slower and in a different direction, is more than 12 billion miles (20 billion km) from Earth. Both probes are exploring interstellar space — the region outside the heliosphere, which is a protective bubble created by the Sun’s magnetic field and the outward flow of charged particles.

“Becoming Voyager project scientist was the best decision I made in my life,” Stone said in 2018. “It opened a wonderful door of exploration.”

He was particularly proud of the way Voyager quickened the pace of scientific analysis and took advantage of opportunities to engage the public. When Voyager 1 and 2 made their close flybys of the giant planets between 1979 and 1989, Stone was overseeing 11 teams of scientists, all accustomed to releasing their results at a slower pace through peer-reviewed journals.

Stone took the lead in tailoring the peer-review process to the faster pace of the mission’s planetary encounters: In the early afternoon, after data had come down, teams of scientists would decide what they thought their best results were for the day and hold up their conclusions for feedback in front of the whole science steering group.

Based on that discussion, Stone would choose the most interesting results to present to the media and the public the next morning. The scientists would then hone their presentations that evening and even overnight — with Stone often pressing them to come up with analogies that would make the material more approachable for a lay audience — while a graphics team worked on putting together supporting images. After the news conference the following morning, the process would begin anew. This cycle could continue daily through the duration of each planetary encounter.

“It was a very exciting time, and everyone was making discoveries,” said Stamatios “Tom” Krimigis of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, who has served as the principal investigator of Voyager’s low-energy charged particles instrument since the mission’s launch. “Ed’s approach showed us how much public interest there really was in what Voyager was doing, but it also resulted in better science. You need more than one piece of information to make a picture, and hearing about other scientists’ data helped us interpret our own.”

It was a process that continued to serve the Voyager team well in 2012 and 2013 as they debated whether or not Voyager 1 had exited the heliosphere and entered interstellar space. Some signs pointed to a new environment, but one key marker — the direction of the magnetic field lines around Voyager — hadn’t changed as significantly as scientists expected.

The team remained puzzled for months until Voyager 1’s plasma wave instrument detected a significantly denser plasma environment around the spacecraft — the result of a chance outburst of material from the Sun that set the plasma around Voyager 1 ringing like a bell. Stone gathered the team.

“Nobody could wait to get to interstellar space, but we wanted to get it right,” said Suzanne Dodd, who has served as Voyager project manager, overseeing the engineering team, at JPL since 2010. “We knew there would be people who disagreed. So Ed wanted to understand the full story and the assumptions people were making. He did a good job listening to everybody and letting them participate in the dialogue without anyone monopolizing. Then he made a decision.”

Stone realized that the scientists didn’t need to fixate on the direction of the magnetic field lines. They were a proxy for the plasma environment. The team concluded that the plasma wave science instrument’s detection provided a better analysis of the current plasma environment and was evidence of humankind’s arrival into interstellar space .

Leading JPL

Voyager’s high profile lifted Stone’s profile as well. In 1991, roughly two years after the mission completed its planetary flybys, Stone became director of JPL, serving until 2001. Under his leadership, JPL was responsible for more than two dozen missions and instruments. Highlights for Stone’s tenure included landing NASA’s Pathfinder mission with the first Mars rover, Sojourner, in 1996 and launching the NASA-ESA (European Space Agency) Cassini/Huygens mission in 1997. The first Saturn orbiter, Cassini was a direct outgrowth of the scientific questions that arose from Voyager’s two flybys, and it carried the only probe that has ever landed in the outer solar system (at Titan).

The 1990s were an era of shifting national priorities after the Cold War, with significant cuts in spending in the NASA and defense budgets. Stone restructured several missions so that they could fly under these more stringent cost constraints, including overseeing a redesign of the Spitzer Space Telescope cooling system so that it was more cost effective and could still deliver high-impact science and stunning infrared images of the universe.

Journey to Space

Edward Carroll Stone Jr. was born on Jan. 23, 1936, in Knoxville, Iowa. The eldest of two sons of Edward Carroll Stone Sr. and Ferne Elizabeth Stone, he grew up in the nearby commercial center of Burlington.

Edward Stone Sr. was a construction superintendent who delighted in showing his son how to take things apart and put them back together again — cars, radios, hi-fi stereos. When the younger Stone was in junior high, the principal asked him to learn how to operate the school’s 16 mm movie projector and soon followed up with a request to run the school’s reel-to-reel tape recorder.

“I was always interested in learning about why something is this way and not that way,” Stone said in an interview about this career in 2018. “I wanted to understand and measure and observe.”

His first job was at a J.C. Penney department store, where he worked his way up from stockroom to clerk on the store floor. He also earned money playing French horn in the Burlington Municipal Band.

After high school, Stone enrolled in Burlington Junior College to study physics, and went on to the University of Chicago for graduate school. Shortly after he was accepted, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and the Space Age began.

“Space was a brand-new field waiting for discovery,” Stone recalled in 2018.

He joined a team at the university that was building science instruments to launch into space. The first he designed rode aboard Discoverer 36, a since-declassified spy satellite that launched in 1961 and took photographs of Earth from space as part of the Corona program. Stone’s instrument, which measured the Sun’s energetic particles, helped scientists figure out why solar radiation was fogging the film and ultimately improved their understanding of the Van Allen belts, energetic particles trapped in Earth’s magnetic field.

In 1964, Stone joined Caltech as a postdoctoral fellow, running the university’s Space Radiation Lab together with Robbie Vogt, who had been a colleague at Chicago. They worked closely on a number of NASA satellite missions, studying galactic cosmic rays and solar energetic particles. In 1972, Vogt recommended Stone to JPL leadership for the position of Voyager project scientist, which he held for 50 years.

Among Stone’s many awards, the National Medal of Science from President George H.W. Bush stands out as the most prominent. In 2019 he won the Shaw Prize in Astronomy, with an award of $1.2 million, for his leadership in the Voyager project, which, as the citation noted, “has over the past four decades, transformed our understanding of the four giant planets and the outer solar system, and has now begun to explore interstellar space.” He was also proud to have a middle school named after him in Burlington, Iowa, as an inspiration to young learners.

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Calla Cofield

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

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