Edward Stone Jr., Voyager Project Leader, to Head JPL

Edward C. Stone Jr., chief scientist on the “Grand Tour” of the outer planets by the twin Voyager spacecraft, has been named director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Stone, an internationally known physicist and the vice president of Caltech, will succeed Lew Allen Jr., who announced earlier that he will retire. Allen, former chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, has agreed to stay on until December for a smooth transition, said Caltech President Thomas E. Everhart.

JPL, operated by Caltech for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is the world leader in planetary exploration.

Stone will retain his position as vice president for astronomical facilities and professor of physics at Caltech. He also will continue as chairman of the Board of Directors of the California Assn. for Research in Astronomy, which is building the world’s largest telescope in Hawaii. The 10-meter Keck Telescope is a joint UC-Caltech project.

“After a national search, we are excited that a man of Ed Stone’s drive and vision is in the right place at the right time,” Everhart said in announcing Stone’s selection. He added that Stone was the unanimous first choice of “a distinguished search committee.”

“It’s an exciting opportunity,” Stone said. “This coming decade there are a lot of new opportunities and I’m just looking forward to providing the scientific leadership” at JPL.

Stone has so many responsibilities that “a few things are going to have to give way,” but he said his work load should ease this fall when the Keck Telescope passes a major milestone with the installation of its mirrors.

As director of JPL, Stone will run a 175-acre research laboratory that he knows well. For 17 years he served as chief scientist on the Voyager program, one of the most successful expeditions in the history of space exploration. The twin spacecraft visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, sending back close-up photos of all four planets and their satellites.

The lab has a number of major programs coming to fruition, although none on the scale of Voyager. The Galileo spacecraft is on its way to Jupiter, where it will spend two years sending back data on that planet and its moons.

Magellan is nearing Venus and will map almost all of the planet’s surface with a radar-imaging system that will pierce through the planet’s dense cloud cover. Other missions include participation in the U.S.-European Ulysses mission to study the sun, scheduled for launch from the space shuttle in October, and a Mars reconnaissance mission set for 1992.

All of the JPL missions use unmanned vehicles.