• Home
  • News
    • Politics & Government
    • Business & Economy
    • Crime / Courts
    • Health / Medicine
  • Sports
    • High School Sports
    • Radio Iowa Poll
  • Affiliates
    • Affiliate Support Page
  • Contact Us
    • Reporters

Radio Iowa

Iowa's Radio News Network

You are here: Home / Education / Burlington school named for space scientist

Burlington school named for space scientist

August 20, 2012 By Matt Kelley

 

Voyager

A school in southeast Iowa opened under a new name today to honor a native son. Burlington’s Edward Stone Middle School is named after a key scientist in NASA’s Voyager program.

 Stone, who was in Burlington for his 58th high school class reunion, says Voyager One is now 11-billion miles from Earth and is about to begin its last mission, exploring interstellar space with a cosmic ray spectrometer, a tool he helped create.

“We designed this instrument for this part of the mission,” Stone says. “These are very high energy atomic nuclei which were accelerated by the explosion of super nova nearby the sun maybe five, ten, 15-million year ago. Once we get out into interstellar space for the first time, we will be able to detect how many of these lower energy cosmic rays from the galaxy are out there.”

After graduating from Burlington High in 1954, Stone attended the community college in Burlington for two years before going to the University of Chicago to get his masters and PHD in physics. In 1972, he became Voyager’s project scientist and later was named the program’s chief scientist.

The two spacecraft were launched in 1977. Stone says nobody in the project knew whether the far-flying machines would function 35 years after launch, but remarkably, they’re still sending home data. “Voyager One is headed northward up out of the plane of the planets and Voyager Two is southward,” Stone says.

“They’re both generally headed in the upwind direction, the direction that the interstellar wind is coming at the sun from. The two spacecraft will be orbiting the center of our galaxy basically forever.” When he was in middle school, Stone says he knew wanted to be involved in science but never imagined he would work with a spacecraft traveling further from Earth than any object sent into space.

“Middle school is a key formative period in education,” he says. “I think what a new middle school does is tell the student that the community believes education is important. Hopefully, they will find that it also ultimately has influenced their career just as it influenced mine.”

 The Voyager mission will end around 2025 when the power supplies on the two spacecraft are finally exhausted.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Filed Under: Education, Human Interest, News

Featured Stories

DOT plow crews struggling against blizzard conditions

Iowa delegation breaks along party lines on Trump impeachment vote

Two northeast Iowa men admit to illegally harvesting ginseng

Do you have to pay tax on your stimulus check?

All six in Iowa’s congressional delegation confirm Electoral College results

TwitterFacebook
Tweets by RadioIowa

Iowa State-Kansas postponed

Iowa-Michigan State postponed

Fire damage to Riverfront Stadium electrical system will cost Waterloo thousands

Iowa State at Kansas State postponed

Iowa State’s Foster to miss remainder of the season

More Sports

eNews and Updates

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Archives

Copyright © 2021 · Learfield News & Ag, LLC