His Head In The Stars
But when it comes to running a space project,
scientist Ed Stone has his feet on the ground.
By Michael Norman, New York Times Magazine May 20, 1990

***
Modern science is usually big science, with apparatus so large and complex it takes teams of scholars and technical experts to make it work. Voyager at one point employed as many as 120 scientists. Ed Stone's leadership on that project has served as a paradigm for such big-science undertakings. With Voyager, Stone was the first director of spacecraft science to bring extensive scientific expertise to management. In doing so, he ''revolutionized the world of project science,'' in the opinion of his boss, Norman Haynes, who for three years was Voyager's overall project director. ***

FOR THE MOST PART, EXPERIMENTALISTS SUCH AS Ed Stone perform in relative obscurity. Their work is arcane and rarely attracts popular notice. Usually, they are part of a large enterprise, such as a space shot, where the significance of their labor is lost in the effort of the group.

Often on space shots, teams come into conflict: a radio team might want one telemetry to measure a planet's mass while an imaging team wants another for high-resolution pictures. For many years - through the flights of Explorer, Ranger, Surveyor, Mariner and Viking - the scientific rivalries at the Jet Propulsion Lab often led to turf wars, personal feuds and shouting matches. ''It simply was chaos,'' said one lab official. On Voyager, too, teams formed around a variety of experiments - 11 in all, covering the general fields of radio science, ultraviolet astronomy, plasma-wave physics, infrared observation, imaging, cosmic rays, low-energy particles and magnetic fields. But instead of putting a professional administrator in charge of the Voyager teams, lab officials, in 1972, reached into the ranks and elevated Ed Stone, a cosmic-ray physicist, to be the project's chief scientist.

''Ed was a real scientist and not just someone filling a job slot,'' said Torrence V. Johnson, a member of Voyager's imaging team and now a head scientist himself, on Project Galileo.

Stone had the right profile for the job. *** He was considered a scholar: ''If a question came up in a field he didn't know about, Ed would go home and read all the papers in that field, then come back the next day better informed than the so-called experts,'' said Johnson. And a workhorse as well: ''He was like this machine,'' recalls Norman Haynes. ''You'd wind him up and, zoom! He went zipping around all day getting things done.''

Most important, he found a way to end the feuding. He insisted on consensus. If a team wanted time on line during an encounter - and time was limited; Voyager spent just five days and five hours close to Neptune - a team leader not only had to persuade Stone his case was compelling, he had to win over his peers on the other teams as well. ''Ed would ask, 'Who's right scientifically?' '' Johnson said. In short, as Haynes has said, ''Ed Stone revolutionized the world of project science.'' ***

The process of science - forming a hypothesis, conducting the experiment, analyzing and interpreting the data, then offering it for a long period of peer review - often makes conservatives out of those who practice it. At first, Ed Stone had trouble convincing his cautious colleagues on the Voyager project that big science, publicly financed science, sometimes demands immediate results.

''I explained that in my mind we were observing nature as it displayed itself, not doing controlled lab experiments,'' he said. ''The public was paying for all this, we had to allow them to share what they are paying for.''

He wanted his principal investigators to speak at the daily news conferences during each encounter, even though they often were puzzled about much of the data they were collecting. Some felt Stone was advocating ''instant science,'' and, as Torrence Johnson remembers it, many of them ''had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the microphone.''

''I told them,'' said Stone, ''you just have to be careful not to explain things you can't explain. Explain only what you think you really know. You say, 'Look, it's a mystery; we don't know what the data is telling us.' This was not the normal scientific process where things are worked over by peer review, but I felt with these encounters there was a real opportunity to share the whole scientific process in a compressed form and we should do it even if it meant violating some of the commonly accepted rules of how you do science.''

Tom, many thanks for posting that and the links. In posting the NASA link on his passing, I had hoped that members of the forum would add additional links or comments.