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Voyager Academy

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Total Enrollment

Overview of Voyager Academy

Voyager Academy is a charter school located in Durham, NC, which is in a large city setting. The student population of Voyager Academy is 1,358 and the school serves K-12. At Voyager Academy, 53% of students scored at or above the proficient level for math, and 70% scored at or above that level for reading. The school’s minority student enrollment is 45%. The student-teacher ratio is 14:1, which is the same as that of the district. The student population is made up of 50% female students and 50% male students. The school enrolls 10% economically disadvantaged students. There are 98 equivalent full-time teachers and 3 full-time school counselors.

At a Glance

Voyager academy 2024 rankings.

Voyager Academy is ranked #418 in North Carolina Elementary Schools and ranked #99 in North Carolina Middle Schools . Schools are ranked on their performance on state-required tests, graduation, and how well they prepare their students for high school. Read more about how we rank the Best Elementary Schools and Best Middle Schools .

All Rankings

• # 418 in  North Carolina Elementary Schools
• # 99 in  North Carolina Middle Schools
• # 48 in  North Carolina Charter Elementary Schools
• # 31 in  North Carolina Charter Middle Schools

Ranking Factors

How Voyager Academy placed statewide out of 1429 elementary schools and 687 middle schools ranked in North Carolina .

Elementary School Reading Proficiency Rank

Middle School Reading Proficiency Rank

Elementary School Math Proficiency Rank

Middle School Math Proficiency Rank

Elementary School Reading Performance

Meets Expectations

Middle School Reading Performance

Somewhat Above Expectations

Elementary School Math Performance

Somewhat Below Expectations

Middle School Math Performance

Students/Teachers at Voyager Academy

These counts and percentages of students and teachers are from data reported by state education agencies to the federal government

School information is provided by the government.

Enrollment by Grade

Kindergarten

Enrollment by Gender

Student Diversity

Minority Enrollment

Black or African American

Hispanic/Latino

Two or more races

Asian or Asian/Pacific Islander

American Indian or Alaska Native

Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander is not included in this breakdown due to an enrollment of 0%.

economically disadvantaged students at Voyager Academy

Full-time teachers

Percentage of full-time teachers who are certified

Student-teacher ratio

Percentage of teachers with 3 or more years experience

Number of full-time school counselors

Test Scores at Voyager Academy

At Voyager Academy, 53% of students scored at or above the proficient level for math, and 70% scored at or above that level for reading. Compared with the district, the school did about the same in math and about the same in reading, according to this metric. In Voyager Academy , 70% of students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 53% tested at or above that level for math. Voyager Academy did better in math and better in reading in this metric compared with students across the state. In North Carolina , 43% of students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 38% tested at or above that level for math.

Subject Proficiency

School Data

School profile information is based on government data.

Charter School

Magnet School

This information relates to schools run by this school's state operating agency. Many districts contain only one school.

Total Schools (all grades)

Total Students (all grades)

Elementary Schoolers Proficient in Reading (district average)

Middle Schoolers Proficient in Reading (district average)

Elementary Schoolers Proficient in Math (district average)

Middle Schoolers Proficient in Math (district average)

101 Hock Parc Drive, Durham, NC 27704

Nearby Schools

4100 N Roxboro Street, Durham, NC 27704 (0 miles)

4019 Holt School Road, Durham, NC 27704 (1 mile)

3507 Dearborn Drive, Durham, NC 27704 (1 mile)

2400 Broad St Ste 2, Durham, NC 27704 (2 miles)

1417 Old Oxford Highway, Durham, NC 27704 (2 miles)

1001 Leon Street, Durham, NC 27704 (2 miles)

400 W Club Boulevard, Durham, NC 27704 (2 miles)

2730 Hillandale Road, Durham, NC 27705 (2 miles)

1305 W. Club Blvd., Durham, NC 27705 (2 miles)

302 Lebanon Circle, Durham, NC 27712 (3 miles)

913 9Th Street, Durham, NC 27705 (3 miles)

700 Watts Street, Durham, NC 27701 (3 miles)

724 Foster Street, Durham, NC 27701 (3 miles)

117 Milton Road, Durham, NC 27712 (3 miles)

401 North Duke Street, Durham, NC 27701 (3 miles)

311 Dowd St, Durham, NC 27701 (3 miles)

227 Milton Road, Durham, NC 27712 (3 miles)

511 Cleveland St, Durham, NC 27701 (3 miles)

Po Box 3537, Durham, NC 27702 (3 miles)

None, Durham, NC 27701 (3 miles)

721 Burch Ave, Durham, NC 27701 (3 miles)

2415 E Geer Street, Durham, NC 27704 (3 miles)

Dumc Room 3605, Durham, NC 27710 (4 miles)

807 West Chapel Hill Street, Durham, NC 27701 (4 miles)

1107 Holloway Street, Durham, NC 27701 (4 miles)

Voyager Academy ' s high ranking earned it eligibility to display U.S. News Best Elementary Schools and Best Middle Schools award badges . Badge eligibility recognizes educational excellence, as described here . Officials at badge-eligible schools can learn how to promote their awards here .

Insufficient student data was reported by six states (California, D.C., Delaware, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington). As such, the rankings for these states were held at their previous positions. They are therefore based on assessment data from 2018-2019 and include schools that were active as of 2019-2020. Updated directory information from 2021-2022 was provided for schools when available.

Data is based on the 2020 - 2021 and 2021 - 2022 school years.

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Staff Directory

Search the directory using the search box located at the upper right side of the table. you may search by any part of the name, title, or school of the person for whom you are looking, e.g. “jones”, “1st grade”, or “middle school”., voyager academy elementary school.

4210 Ben Franklin Blvd Durham, NC 27704 Phone: (919) 433-3301 ext. 4 Fax: (919) 471-3932

Voyager Academy Middle School

101 Hock Parc Durham, NC 27704 Phone: (919) 433-3301 ext. 5 Fax: (919) 433-3305

Voyager Academy High School

4302 Ben Franklin Blvd Durham, NC 27704 Phone: (919) 433-3301 ext. 6 Fax: (919) 620-0554

Create Change

• Technology and Gaming Technology is a fact of life for 21st century learners. Voyager prides itself on teaching our students to think critically and creatively, to overcome the difficulties that may arise. Providing the ability to learn a new language through coding will give them an invaluable toolset when they enter the workforce. Exposing students to different coding languages, robotics equipment and other forms of technology will cultivate productive members of society capable of joining the workforce in higher paying positions. Gaming and technology are more similar than they are different. Through gaming, we expose students to the notion that any one move can have limitless potential and can create a significant impact. Gameschooling skills fosters critical and creative thought, but also work to help students navigate difficult social situations.
• The Arts By establishing education in the arts, we are able to provide children with a tangible resource for managing big feelings. Not only can we guide them through an education in emotional intelligence through art, but we are able to solve for one of the biggest problems facing incoming kindergartners: readiness. Contra Costa County is currently faced with having 1 in 4 preschool students who are not ready for kindergarten. With the numbers on the rise, the biggest indicator of failing kindergarten resides in fine motor development. By utilizing the arts daily, children are able to develop their fine motor skills enabling them to tackle more difficult concepts like writing and reading which opens the door to lifelong learning.
• History Voyager will be working along side members of our community to give our students dynamic history lessons that demonstrate the importance of perspective. In formulating our own curiculum based on diverse and historically significant individuals and project based learning, students will receive an education that enables them to see beyond themselves and into a different period of time. It gives them an opportunity to make real decisions and see the outcome of their choices, but most importantly it helps them to see that just one person, perhaps someone just like them, can have a significant impact on their community and their world.
• Wellness (Physical Education Redesigned) Physical Education at Voyager will offer dynamic lessons with activities that range from hiking and yoga to the more traditional soccer and basketball. Students will be engaged with a teacher who promotes physical fitness, but who also teaches them about how to make healthy choices and explains concepts important to health education such as how to take a pulse. PE programing will also combine with elements of occupational therapy (strength training activities) and physical therapy to create a well-rounded class that aims to better serve all of our students. The goal of the physical education program at Voyager does not solely rest on passing the Presidential Test of Physical Fitness, but is instead to create students who will lead a lifelong goal of making healthful choices. Studies have shown that when children can regularly connect with nature, they are more resilient and have higher self- esteem, concentration, cognitive development, cooperation and flexibility. Being on the edge of town and on several acres, gives us the ability to access nature and all the wonder that pertains to it.
• Math and Science Reading books and completing worksheets are perhaps the most tedious aspects of math and science class. There are some benefits, but there are even more when you provide real-life experiences, real-world applications and use a multi-sensory approach to teaching. By combining these three elements, we can reach all of our students. By offering a few different ways to learn the material and showing its importance in our world, students can see how these two subjects impact them directly. With this understanding, we equip students with a growth mindset that allows them to navigate more challenging information as they learn new material. One of the most difficult pieces of feeling motivated to do well in school comes from the question of if what you are doing matters to your larger picture. At Voyager, we will supply our students with opportunities to gain real experiences from forming a company to marketing products and services, to experiencing factories and building upon life skills. Students will spend their academic careers not wondering why they have to complete a task, but asking and answering questions to help in better navigating to find real world solutions.
• Global Studies Voyager’s Global Studies course will be implemented throughout the child’s academic career with our school. This course offers an inside look at cultures around the world. While our students are learning about geography and are exploring the intricate details of culture, they will also hear from students in these areas. Voyager is actively developing a network of progressive schools around the world. This will provide our students with a chance to experience another child’s culture uniquely, helping them to become more aware of our interconnectedness.
• Literacy Literacy will be explored and learned through multi-sensory approaches. We understand that students can best learn to read once they have mastered writing the alphabet. We understand that students best learn to identify letters with the use of visual, auditory and kinesthetic components. Literacy will be a course that explores the senses and aims to create students who value reading and writing. Voyager will also provide unique opportunities for students to read to the animals located in our on-site animal sanctuary. Mini-pigs, donkeys, cats and goats all enjoy the various stories they can read to them.
• Ongoing Nature Study By altering the status quo and providing students with weekly opportunities to reach beyond the textbook and experience the magic that exists in nature. Through meticulously planned outdoor adventures, students will grow in the understanding that the value of land and that which inhabits it are far more than monetary. Many positive interactions in nature will help in building memories that will serve these students throughout their lives- from identifying plant and animal life to discerning between animal tracks and scat, tracking migratory patterns, tracking identified species in differing locations and bearing witness to the incredible force that is mother nature.

Lunar Landing Preschool

Take a look at the program that started it all, Lunar Landing Preschool for students ages 3-5.

Elementary Program

Ready to learn more? Take a peek into elementary programming at Voyager Academy.

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Ed Stone, JPL director and top scientist on Voyager mission, dies at 88

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Ed Stone, the scientist who guided NASA’s breakthrough Voyager mission to the outer planets for 50 years and led the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when it landed its first rover on Mars, died Tuesday. He was 88.

A physicist who got in on the ground floor of space exploration, Stone played a leading role in NASA missions to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The discoveries made under his watch revolutionized scientists’ understanding of the solar system and fueled humanity’s ambition to explore distant worlds.

Carolyn Porco, who worked on imaging on JPL’s Voyager and Cassini missions, called Stone “a thoroughly lovely man” who was “as close to perfect as a project scientist could ever be.”

“When two science teams were in contention over some spacecraft resource, and Ed had to decide between the two, even the guy who lost went away thinking, ‘Well, if this is what Ed has decided, then it must be the right answer,’” Porco said by email Tuesday. “I feel blessed to have known Ed. And like many people today, I’m very sad to know he’s gone.”

Stone was a 36-year-old Caltech physics professor in 1972 when he was asked to serve as chief scientist for an audacious plan to send a pair of spacecraft to explore the solar system’s four giant planets for the first time.

It was the opportunity of a lifetime, but he wasn’t sure he wanted the gig.

“I hesitated because I was a fairly young professor at that point. I still had a lot of research I wanted to do,” he recalled 40 year later.

He took it anyway, and from the mission’s first encounter with Jupiter in 1979 to its final flyby of Neptune in 1989, Stone became the scientific face of the Voyager mission. He guided the science agenda and helped the public make sense of revolutionary images and data not just from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, but from many of their fascinating moons.

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Stone and his more than 200 science collaborators were the first to discover lightning on Jupiter and volcanoes on its moon Io. They spotted six never-before-seen moons around Saturn and found evidence of the largest ocean in the solar system on Jupiter’s moon Europa, as well as geysers on Neptune’s moon Triton.

“It seemed like everywhere we looked, as we encountered those planets and their moons, we were surprised,” Stone told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “We were finding things we never imagined, gaining a clearer understanding of the environment Earth was part of. I can close my eyes and still remember every part of it.”

The Voyager 1 spacecraft became the first manmade object to reach interstellar space in 2012, and Voyager 2 followed suit in 2018.

The twin probes continue to send weekly communications to Earth from interstellar space. Stone retired in 2022 on the mission’s 50th anniversary.

“A part of Ed lives on in the two Voyager spacecraft. The fingerprints of his dedication and keen leadership are woven into the Voyager mission,” said Linda Spilker, who joined the mission in 1977 and succeeded him as project scientist.

The Voyager mission was Stone’s crowning achievement, but hardly his only one.

He was a principal investigator on nine NASA missions and a co-investigator on five others, including several satellites designed to study cosmic rays, the solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic field.

He became director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge in 1991, a role he held for a decade.

It was an era of cost-cutting at NASA, but Stone still managed to launch Galileo’s five-year mission to Jupiter and send the Cassini spacecraft to Saturn . He was also at the agency’s helm when Mars Pathfinder delivered the Sojourner rover to the Red Planet. It marked the first time that humans had put a robotic rover on the surface of another planet.

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Throughout his tenure at JPL, Stone continued to work and teach at Caltech, even teaching freshman physics during some of Voyager’s long cruise times between planets.

He also served as chairman of the board of the California Assn. for Research in Astronomy, which is responsible for building and operating the W.M. Keck Observatory and its two 10-meter telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Edward Carroll Stone Jr. was born in Iowa on Jan. 23, 1936, and grew up in Burlington, where his father ran a small construction business and his mother kept the company books.

The eldest of two brothers, Stone was attracted to science from a young age. Under his father’s watchful eye, he learned how to take apart and reassemble all varieties of technology, from radios to cars.

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

After studying physics at Burlington Junior College, he received his master’s and doctorate at the University of Chicago. Shortly after he began his graduate studies, news broke in 1957 that the former Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite.

“Just like that, because of the Cold War and our need to match Sputnik, a whole new realm absolutely opened up,” he said.

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Stone built a device for measuring the intensity of solar energetic particles above the atmosphere that hitched a ride to space aboard an Air Force satellite in 1961. Unfortunately the spacecraft’s transmitter didn’t work, so only a very limited quantity of data was returned to Earth. However, it was still enough to indicate that the intensity of the particles was lower than expected.

Despite the transmitter glitch, Stone said the project was thrilling. “We were taking the first steps in a whole new area of research and exploration,” he said. “We were right at the beginning.”

He joined the faculty at Caltech in 1964 and created more space experiments, this time for NASA.

Stone’s particular area of interest was cosmic rays — high-speed atomic nuclei that can originate from explosive events on the sun or from violent events beyond the solar system.

One of his cosmic-ray experiments was included among the 11 major Voyager experiments.

Colleagues praised Stone for his leadership of the Voyager science team.

“He was a great hero, a giant among men,” said Porco, adding that Stone was known to treat everyone — from top scientists to graduate students — with respect.

Voyager team scientist Thomas Donahue put it this way: “Over the years, Ed Stone has proved to be remarkably adept at keeping a bunch of prima donnas on track.”

Stone was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1984 and received the National Medal of Science from President George H.W. Bush in 1991 in recognition of his leadership of the Voyager mission. He won the Shaw Prize in Astronomy in 2019 , an honor that comes with a $1.2-million award. In 2012 his hometown of Burlington, Iowa, named its new middle school after him.

“This is truly an honor because it comes from the community where my exploration journey began,” Stone told a local newspaper.

Decades after Voyager’s launch he was asked to select his favorite moment from the mission. He chose the discovery of volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io .

“Finding a moon that’s 100 times more active volcanically than the entire Earth, it’s really quite striking,” he said. “And this was typical of what Voyager was going to do on the rest of its journey through the outer solar system.

“Time after time, we found that nature was much more inventive than our models,” he said.

His wife, Alice, whom he met on a blind date at the University of Chicago and married in 1962, died in December. The couple are survived by their two daughters, Susan and Janet Stone, and two grandsons.

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Deborah Netburn covers faith, spirituality and joy for the Los Angeles Times. She started at The Times in 2006 and has worked across a wide range of sections including entertainment, home and garden, national news, technology and science.

Corinne Purtill is a science and medicine reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Her writing on science and human behavior has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Time Magazine, the BBC, Quartz and elsewhere. Before joining The Times, she worked as the senior London correspondent for GlobalPost (now PRI) and as a reporter and assignment editor at the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. She is a native of Southern California and a graduate of Stanford University.

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Who Gave the Academy Award Its “Oscar” Nickname?

The golden statuette has been called “Oscar” since the 1930s, but the origins of the nickname are a matter of dispute.

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But where did the Oscar name come from? That’s a question of some dispute, and the definitive answer may never be known. The nickname arose in the 1930s, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but several different people claimed to have coined it.

Margaret Herrick

The most famous and widely accepted origin story for the name Oscar is credited to Margaret Herrick, the Academy’s first librarian. The story goes that Herrick saw one of the awards sitting on an executive’s desk and remarked, “He reminds me of my Uncle Oscar.”

The Oscar in question was Oscar Pierce , a Texas fruit and wheat grower, and although she affectionately called him her “uncle,” he was, in fact, her first cousin once removed (her mother’s cousin). Academy staff reportedly overheard Herrick’s off-handed remark, and it stuck, becoming the statuette’s unofficial nickname.

Although best known today for this story, the Academy has called Herrick “among the lesser-known of cinema’s earliest champions” and credited her with “laying the foundation for the Academy’s research library, one of the world’s most important collections documenting the history, art, sciences, and industry of motion pictures.”

Herrick became executive director of the Academy in 1943, replacing her first husband Donald Gledhill, who left to join the United States Army during World War II, according to the Academy.

Sidney Skolsky

Famous Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky claimed he came up with the nickname while writing about the 6th Academy Awards in 1934. He claimed he was tired of constantly having to write “gold statuette,” finding the latter word both pretentious and difficult to spell.

“The snobbery of that particular Academy Award annoyed me,” Skolsky wrote in his book Don’t Get Me Wrong—I Love Hollywood . “I wanted to make the gold statuette human ... I’d show them, acting so high and mighty about their prize. I’d give it a name, a name that would erase their phony dignity.”

Skolsky wrote that he chose “Oscar” because of an old vaudeville joke in which a comedian would ask the orchestra leader, “Will you have a cigar, Oscar?” only to withdraw the cigar when the orchestra leader tried to reach for it. Skolsky wrote: “In a few years, Oscar was the accepted name. It proved to be the magic name.”

The Academy states that Skolsky’s column on March 16, 1934, is the “first confirmed newspaper reference to the Academy Award as an Oscar.” But whether he invented the term himself has been questioned, especially since the legendary Walt Disney reportedly used the term Oscar while accepting an award at the same 1934 ceremony Skolsky was covering.

Bette Davis

One of the more prevalent and colorful theories is that Oscar was named by Bette Davis , one of Hollywood’s most legendary actors. Known for her roles in such films as Now, Voyager (1942) and All About Eve (1950), Davis also became the first female president of the Academy in 1941.

Davis won her first of two Academy Awards for Best Actress in 1936 for her performance in the drama film Dangerous (1935). Upon receiving the statuette, Davis remarked that its naked rear end reminded her of her husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson, after getting out of the shower.

Newspaper articles about that year’s ceremony also reference Davis calling the award her “little Oscar,” fueling rumors that she was the one who invented the nickname. However, many observers have noted that the nickname was in use years before Davis’ win, casting doubt that it originated with her.

Eleanore Lilleberg

The most recently offered theory behind Oscar’s naming came from former Academy Executive Director Bruce Davis. While researching for his book The Academy and the Award , Davis claims he found proof that the term originated with Eleanore Lilleberg, an Academy secretary when the award was first introduced.

Lilleberg had been in charge of handling the awards before the ceremony. During his research, Davis found an autobiography by Einar Lilleberg, Eleanore’s brother, that stated Lilleberg called the awards “Oscar” after a Norwegian army veteran she knew in Chicago, who Einar said always “stood straight and tall.”

Davis wrote that some mistakenly believed the nickname was inspired by Norway’s King Oscar II, but that this a misconception. The king, whose image was widely known because it was featured on sardine tins, apparently didn’t look like the Oscar statuette at all.

Although inconclusive, Davis claims he found additional newspaper interviews and oral histories that affirms this theory, according to Deadline . One of them read: “Unsought though it was, the credit for originating one of the world’s best-known nicknames should almost certainly belong to her.”

Colin McEvoy joined the Biography.com staff in 2023, and before that had spent 16 years as a journalist, writer, and communications professional. He is the author of two true crime books: Love Me or Else and Fatal Jealousy . He is also an avid film buff, reader, and lover of great stories.

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Dr. Edward C. Stone (1936-2024)

Edward C. Stone was an internationally known physicist who served as project scientist for the Voyager program from 1972 to 2022. As a graduate student at the University Chicago, he was inspired to enter the fields of planetary science and space exploration by the launch of Sputnik in 1957.

Stone was born in Knoxville, Iowa, on January 23, 1936. After receiving his undergraduate education at Iowa's Burlington Junior College, Stone attended the University of Chicago where he earned his master's degree and Ph.D. in physics. He then joined the staff of Caltech as a researcher, and became a full faculty member in 1967. In 1972, he became the Voyager project scientist.

Since the launch of the two Voyager spacecraft in 1977, Stone had coordinated the efforts of 11 teams of scientists in their investigations of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. He also became nationally known as the JPL public spokesman during the planetary flybys, explaining the Voyager's scientific discoveries to the public. Highlights of his decade of leadership included Galileo's five-year orbital mission to Jupiter, the launch of Cassini to Saturn, the launch of Mars Global Surveyor and a new generation of Earth science satellites such as TOPEX/Poseidon and SeaWinds, and the successful Mars Pathfinder landing in 1997. Stone retired from JPL in April of 2001 and subsequently worked full-time at Caltech, teaching and doing research.

In the late 1980s through the 1990s, Stone served as vice chairman and chairman of the Board of Directors of the California Association for Research in Astronomy, which is responsible for building and operating the W.M. Keck Observatory with its two ten-meter telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. He also served as Director of the W.M. Keck Foundation.

In addition to becoming a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1984, Stone was recognized with numerous awards, among them the NASA Distinguished Service Medal and National Medal of Science.

Publications

• Communications Technologies for Space Exploration , Stone, E. C., Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 87, No. 6 pp. 1044-6, 1999.
• Constraints on the Time Delay between Nucleosynthesis and Cosmic-Ray Acceleration from Observations of Sup 59/Ni and Sup 59/Co , Wiedenbeck, M. E., W. R. Binns, E. R. Christian, A. C. Cummings, B. L. Dougherty, P. L. Hink, J. Klarmann, R. A. Leske, M. Lijowski, R. A. Mewaldt, E. C. Stone, M. R. Thayer, T. T. Von Rosenvinge, and N. E. Yanasak, Astrophysical Journal, Letters, Vol. 523, No. 1 pp. L61-4, 1999.
• The Cosmic-Ray Isotope Spectrometer for the Advanced Composition Explorer , Stone, E. C., C. M. S. Cohen, W. R. Cook, A. C. Cummings, B. Gauld, B. Kecman, R. A. Leske, R. A. Mewaldt, M. R. Thayer, and B. L. Dougherty, The Advanced Composition Explorer mission; Proceedings of the ASE Science Workshop, California Inst. of Technology, Pasadena, Jan. 7-9, 1997.; Space Sciences Reviews, Vol. 86, Nos. 1-4, 1998, p. 285-356.
• Effects of Absorption by Io on Composition of Energetic Heavy Ions , Garrard, T. L., E. C. Stone, and N. Murphy, Science, Vol. 274, No. 5286 pp. 393-394, 1996.
• Energetic Particle Signatures of Satellites and Rings in Neptune's Magnetosphere , Selesnick, R. S. and E. C. Stone, (Planetary studies; Proceedings of Symposium 4 and the Topical Meeting of the Interdisciplinary Scientific Commission B /Meetings B7 and B8/ of the COSPAR 28th Plenary Meeting, The Hague, Netherlands, June 25-July 6, 1990. A92-45276 19-91) Advances in Space Research, Vol. 12, No. 11, p. 71-79, Nov. 1992.
• Estimate of the Distance to the Solar Wind Termination Shock from Gradients of Anomalous Cosmic Ray Oxygen , Cummings, A. C., E. C Stone, and W. R. Webber, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 98, No. A9 p. 15,165-15,168. Sept. 1, 1993.
• Event-to-Event Variations in the Isotopic Composition of Neon in Solar Energetic Particle Events , Leske, R. A., R. A. Mewaldt, C. M. S. Cohen, A. C. Cummings, E. C. Stone, M. E. Wiedenbeck, E. R.Christian, and T. T. Von Rosenvinge, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 26, No. 17 pp. 2693-2696, 1999.
• Face to Face - with Edward Stone , Benson, J. and E. C. Stone, Aerospace America, Vol. 30, No. 7 pp. 6-8, 1992.
• Inferred Charge States of High Energy Solar Particles from the Solar Isotope Spectrometer on Ace , Cohen, C. M. S., A. C. Cummings, R. A. Leske, R. A. Mewaldt, E. C.Stone, B. L Dougherty, M. E. Wiedenbeck, E. R. Christian, and T. T. Von Rosenvinge, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 149-152, 1999.
• Io Encounters Past and Present - a Heavy Ion Comparison , Cohen, C. M. S., Garrard, T. L., E. C. Stone, J. F. Cooper, N. Murphy, and N. Gehrels, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 105, No. A4, p. 7775-7782, 1 Apr. 2000.
• Mars and the Search for Life Elsewhere - Innovations in the Third Era of Space Exploration , Stone, E. C., AIAA Paper 99-0002, AIAA Student Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1, p. 4-7, Spring 2000.
• New Observations of Heavy-Ion-Rich Solar Particle Events from Ace , Cohen, C. M. S., R. A. Mewaldt, R. A. Leske, A. C. Cummings, E. C. Stone, M. E. Wiedenbeck, E. R. Christian, E. R. and T. T. Von Rosenvinge, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 26, No. 17 pp. 2697-2700, 1999.
• Particle Acceleration and Sources in the November 1997 Solar Energetic Particle Events , Mason, G. M., C. M. S. Cohen, A. C. Cummings, J. R. Dwyer, R. E. Gold, S. M. Krimigis, R. A. Leske, J. E. Mazur, R. A. Mewaldt, E. Mobius, M. Popecki, E. C. Stone, T. T. Von Rosenvinge, and M. E. Wiedenbeck, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 26, No. 2 pp. 141-144, 1999.
• Sampex Studies of Anomalous Cosmic Rays Using the Geomagnetic Field , Mewaldt, R. A., J. R. Cummings, A. C. Cummings, R. A. Leske, E. C. Stone, and T. T. Von Rosenvinge, presented at International Solar Wind 8 Conference Jun. 30, 1995.
• The Solar Isotope Spectrometer for the Advanced Composition Explorer , Stone, E. C., C. M. S. Cohen, W. R. Cook, A. C. Cummings, B. Gauld, B. Kecman, R. A. Leske, R. A. Mewaldt, M. R. Thayer, and B. L. Dougherty, The Advanced Composition Explorer mission; Proceedings of the ASE Science Workshop, California Inst. of Technology, Pasadena, Jan. 7-9, 1997.; Space Sciences Reviews, Vol. 86, Nos. 1-4, p. 357-408, 1998.
• Two-Dimensional Position-Sensitive Silicon Detectors for the Ace Solar Ope Spectrometer , Wiedenbeck, M. E., E. R. Christian, W. R. Cook, III, A. C. Cummings, B. L. Dougherty, R. A. Leske, R. A. Mewaldt, E. C. Stone, and T. T. Rosenvinge, Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering, Vol. 2806 pp. 176-187, 1996.
• Unusual Isotopic Composition of Solar Energetic Particles Observed in the November 6, 1997 Event , Leske, R. A., C. M. S. Cohen, A. C. Cummings, R. A. Mewaldt, E. C. Stone, B. L. Dougherty, M. E. Wiedenbeck, E. R. Christian, and T. T. Von Rosenvinge, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 26, No. 2 pp. 153-156, 1999.
• The Voyager Encounter with Neptune , Stone, E. C. and E. D. Miner, Journal of Geophysical Research Supplement, Vol. 96, p. 18,903-18,906, Oct. 30, 1991.
• The Voyager Mission Through the Jupiter Encounters , Stone, E. C., Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 86, No. A10, pp. 8123-8124, September 30, 1981.
• Voyager 1 Encounter with the Jovian System , Stone, E. C. and A. L. Lane, Science, Vol. 204, pp. 945-948, June 1, 1979

In 1972, Ed Stone became the Voyager Project Scientist. Twenty years later, both Voyager spacecraft were still operating, and this photo was taken in front of a full-scale model of the spacecraft, after Stone had been Director of JPL for about one year.

Stone earned the National Medal of Science in March 1992. A proud colleague of Stone's captured the momentous event on whiteboard with markers.

Dr. Stone circulated through the crowd at a JPL Open House, meeting employees and visitors. Of note, immediately to the right of Stone, in the center of the picture, is Apollo Milton Olin (also known as A.M.O., or "Amo") Smith. Smith was an associate of Frank Malina and involved with rocket testing in the early days of JPL.

FAN EXPO Boston is this weekend. Here's what to know about the event.

Where is a place where you can meet some celebrities, check out your favorite comics and get the lowdown on how to break into the movie business?

The answer is the FAN EXPO Boston , which opens Friday, June 14 and runs through the weekend.

Celebrities like Rosario Dawson, Bryce Dallas Howard , Chevy Chase, Randy Quaid, Beverly D’Angelo , Marisa Tomei and others will be on hand to take photos and talk shop.

The event is known as one of the biggest pop-culture events in Boston and is bound to be a big attraction this weekend.

Here's what to know.

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

What is FAN EXPO?

It is a three-day pop culture extravaganza in Boston featuring a lineup of celebrity guests, voice actors, comic creators, and more.  FAN EXPO is known as one of the biggest pop culture events in Boston where fans of everyone’s favorite comics, manga, anime, tv shows, movies, and more can celebrate and meet some celebrities.

There will be photo opportunities and chances for meet-ups with some of your favorite celebrities.

WHO WILL BE THERE: Faves from Marvel, 'Jurassic Park' 'Star Wars' franchises set for FAN EXPO Boston

When does FAN EXPO take place?

FAN EXPO Boston opens Friday, June 14 at 2 p.m. for VIP, Ultimate, and three-day passholders and at 4 p.m. to the public. The FAN EXPO will continue through Sunday, June 16.

Where is FAN EXPO taking place?

It will be held for all three days at the Hynes Convention Center, located at 900 Boylston St. Boston.

FAN EXPO hours

• Friday 4-9 p.m.
• Saturday 10 a.m. - 7 p.m.
• Sunday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.

What celebrities will be there?

• Ashley Eckstein , the voice of Ahsoka Tano in Star Wars 
• Mads Mikkelsen  (Hannibal, Fantastic Beast: The Secret of Dumbledore )
• Bryce Dallas Howard  (Jurassic World, Spider-Man 3) 
• Rosario Dawson, Eman Esfandi and Diana Lee Inosanto  (Ahsoka )
• Marisa Tomei ( Oscar Winning Actress)
• Sam Raimi ( Legendary Director )
• Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio ( Daredevil)
• Chevy Chase, Randy Quaid, Beverly D’Angelo, and Dana Barron ( National Lampoon’s  series)
• Alan Tudyk ( Firefly, Star Wars, Resident Alien )
• Hugh Dancy  (Hannibal) 
• Rose McGowan and Holly Marie Combs ( Charmed )
• Kate Mulgrew ( Star Trek: Voyager, Orange is the New Black ), and Sean Gunn ( Guardians of the Galaxy )

'So you want to be in pictures?'

During the FAN EXPO , guests will have the opportunity to learn about breaking into the movie business. It will take place at the Hynes Convention Center during the FAN EXPO on June 14 at 6 p.m.

" FAN EXPO attendees will learn firsthand about how to break into the film industry in Massachusetts which continues to be a hotbed of activity for making movies," according to a release from FAN EXPO.

The release continues, "The panel includes producers, actors, casting directors, talent managers, film festival directors and educators who will share their expertise and tell stories about what it is like to make films in Massachusetts. Panelists have worked on Mass.-made films and television series including Academy award-winners  The Holdovers, American Fiction ,  CODA ,  I Wanna Dance with Somebody ,  Knives Out, Equalizer 2, Patriots Day, Fever Pitch, Stronger, The Fighter, Free Guy, Daddy’s Home ,  Bucky F*cking Dent ,  Dexter, Castle Rock, Defending Jacob, The Town, The Finest Hour and Chappaquiddick , and more."

Are there other FAN EXPO events around the country?

Yes. They include FAN EXPO San Francisco, FAN EXPO Dallas, FAN EXPO Canada, MEGACON Orlando, FAN EXPO Boston, FAN EXPO Denver, CALGARY EXPO, FAN EXPO Chicago, FAN EXPO Philadelphia, FAN EXPO Portland, FAN EXPO New Orleans, FAN EXPO Cleveland, FAN EXPO Vancouver, Toronto Comicon, Dallas FAN FESTIVAL, and EDMONTON EXPO.

Where can tickets be purchased?

To purchase F AN EXPO Boston tickets, click on this  link.

William Anders, Apollo 8 astronaut who shot ‘Earthrise,’ dies at 90

As part of the first crewed mission to orbit the moon, he looked toward home and took one of the most famous photos of all time.

On Christmas Eve in 1968, the three astronauts on Apollo 8 looked back toward home as their craft made one of its 10 orbits around the moon. Framed inside the window was the marbled blue orb of Earth, sitting above the slate gray lunar surface and surrounded — beautiful and vulnerable — by the blackness of space.

“Oh my God! Look at that picture over there,” said William Anders, an Air Force major at the time, on NASA’s first crew to leave the confines of Earth’s orbit. “Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, that’s pretty.”

He asked Navy Capt. James A. Lovell Jr. to pass him a roll of color film. “Oh man,” Lovell said, in a conversation captured on the onboard recorder, “that’s great.”

The shot taken by Maj. Anders — an image later known as “Earthrise” — became one of the most significant photos of all time: a humbling, awesome and inspirational reminder of humanity’s small and fragile presence in the cosmos.

“To me it was strange that we had worked and had come all the way to the moon to study the moon, and what we really discovered was the Earth,” recalled Maj. Anders, who died June 7 in the crash of a private plane he was piloting over waters near Jones Island in the San Juan Channel in Washington state. He was 90.

The death was confirmed by his son, Greg Anders, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. Eric Peter, the sheriff of San Juan County, said an investigation was launched into the cause of the crash of the vintage two-seat Beechcraft T-34 Mentor.

The Apollo 8 mission lifted off shortly before 8 a.m. on Dec. 21, 1968, with the giant Saturn V rocket pushing them out of earth’s orbit for the 240,000-mile journey to the moon. That had not been the original plan.

The astronauts — Maj. Anders, Lovell and commander Col. Frank Borman — had at first trained to orbit the Earth to test the lunar module, designed to bring a future crew to the moon’s surface. Maj. Anders, a specialist in space radiation, was assigned to put the module through tests.

The final engineering work on the module was not completed in time, however. That forced NASA to make Apollo 8 a scouting party — and the first crewed mission to orbit the moon. The main task was to photograph and film the terrain, study the lunar surface composition and map out possible landing sites for the historic first steps on the moon. (On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong hopped from the ladder of the Apollo 11 lunar module to the surface of the moon, followed by Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin. )

Apollo 8 was fitted with a simulated lunar module, called the Lunar Module Test Article, to assess how the command craft maneuvered during lunar orbit. As part of the camera supplies was black-and-white film and several color rolls of Kodak Ektachrome, according to NASA.

For about 20 hours, the craft circled the moon. On the fourth orbit, the Earth came into perfect view. Half the Earth shines in the sun’s rays; the night side of the planet blends into the inky infinity of space. “So here was this orb looking like a Christmas tree ornament,” Maj. Anders recalled in a NASA oral history .

“As I looked down at the Earth, which is about the size of your fist at arm’s length, I’m thinking, ‘This is not a very big place. Why can’t we get along?’” Maj. Anders said in a video played to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission in 2018.

The Apollo 8 flight capped a year of staggering turmoil. In the United States, racial and political tensions boiled over in violence over the Vietnam War and the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. In Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia was the latest Soviet bloc to suffer the Kremlin’s wrath to put down a pro-freedom uprising .

Maj. Anders’s photo, released by NASA in the final days of 1968, instantly became a powerful counterpoint for unity and reflection. The image was used in a 1969 U.S. postage stamp and reproduced on posters and pop art. “Earthrise” also helped advance the environmental movement by inspiring the creation of Earth Day in 1970.

In 2003, the image was on the cover of Life magazine’s collection of “100 Photographs That Changed the World.” (Maj. Anders jokingly called “Earthrise” a “crappy photo” because he considered it slightly out of focus.)

“He traveled to the threshold of the Moon and helped all of us see something else: ourselves,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wrote in a social media post after Maj. Anders’s death.

At the end of a Christmas Eve television broadcast by the Apollo 8 crew — watched by more than 500 million people around the world — the astronauts took turns reading the opening biblical passage from the Book of Genesis. Maj. Anders was first: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

William Alison Anders was born on Oct. 17, 1933, in Hong Kong, then a British colony, where his mother lived while his father, a Navy lieutenant, served aboard a gunboat patrolling the Yangtze River in China.

The family then lived in Annapolis, Md., before returning to Asia. His father, Lt. Arthur Anders, was second-in-command of the gunboat Panay, which helped evacuate Americans after Japan sharply escalated its battles with China in July 1937 in the Sino-Japanese War.

The young William and his mother fled to the Philippines. Japanese warplanes targeted the Panay, wounding the elder Anders and inflicting so much damage to the vessel that it began to sink. Lt. Anders helped evacuate the crew and received the Navy Cross for valor.

The younger Anders graduated from the Naval Academy in 1955 but later obtained an Air Force commission. He served as a fighter pilot in California and Iceland, tracking Soviet aircraft. In 1962, he received a master’s degree in nuclear engineering, specializing in space radiation, from the Air Force Institute of Technology in Ohio. He was selected by NASA for astronaut training a year later.

Maj. Anders retired from NASA and the Air Force in 1969 and became executive secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, a presidential advisory unit. He served as U.S. ambassador to Norway from May 1976 to June 1977.

He had stints in the private sector, including as the chief executive of General Dynamics Corp., an aerospace and defense company, before he retired to Washington state and took up racing aircraft. He retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1988 as a major general.

In a 2018 interview with the Guardian, Maj. Anders said “Earthrise” changed him, too. “It really undercut my religious beliefs. The idea that things rotate around the pope and up there is a big supercomputer wondering whether Billy was a good boy yesterday? It doesn’t make any sense.”

He married the former Valerie Hoard in 1955. In addition to his wife and their son Greg, survivors include three other sons, Alan, Glen, and Eric; and two daughters, Gayle and Diana. (Maj. Anders and his wife founded the Heritage Flight Museum , now located in Burlington, Wash.)

Twenty-two years after Maj. Anders’s photo, the astronomer Carl Sagan suggested to NASA that the Voyager 1 space probe turn its camera back to Earth for a parting image from the fringes of the solar system from about 4 billion miles away. Earth is nothing more than a pinprick.

The two perspectives of our planet — Anders’s view from orbiting the moon and the “Pale Blue Dot” as Sagan called it — reinforced with images what poets always recognized: the Earth as a shared cocoon in the merciless heavens.

‘To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats,” wrote the poet Archibald MacLeish in a commentary in the New York Times on Christmas Day 1968, “is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.”

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