Employee Info

UniqueID

N12764

Photo

First Name

Nobie

Middle (1)

H

Middle (2)

Last Name

Stone

Suffix

Biography

Dr. Stone was raised in Port St. Joe, a small town on the coast of Northwest Florida, where his father was supervisor of the public school system and his mother taught high school English. From an early age, he had a natural curiosity about the world around us, and the heavens in particular. He earned his BS and MS degrees in Engineering Science from Florida State University in 1966 and 1968, respectively, and his Ph.D., from the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) in 1979. While in undergraduate school, he had the opportunity to work as a coop student with NASA, which brought him to Huntsville in 1962 to work at Marshall on the Apollo Program. He worked in several areas over the next four years, but spent his last work period in Space Science Laboratory, the research arm of Marshall directed by Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, where he returned after graduation. Dr. Stone specialized in space plasma physics (the physics of electrically charged gasses). He developed a world-class plasma research facility at Marshall in which the disturbance created by a spacecraft moving at orbital speed through earth’s ionosphere could be accurately simulated and studied. (The ionosphere is a layer of electrically charged gas, or plasma, created high in the earth’s atmosphere by solar ultraviolet radiation.) In space, an orbiting satellite moves through the relatively stationary ionosphere at hypersonic speeds. The relative speed was matched in the laboratory simu-lations, but the situation had to be reversed—a stationary test body (the satellite) was placed in a hypersonic plasma stream (representing the ionosphere). At the time he began these studies, there was no way to measure the complex motion of the electrically charged atoms and molecules of the hypersonic plasma stream into and out of the region of disturbed flow created around the test body. To accommodate these studies, Stone and his team developed the Differential Ion Flux Probe (DIFP). This unique instrument was able to deconvolve multiple intermingled plasma steams and determine the particle mass, the flow direction and speed, and number density of each individual stream. This new capability enabled a more complete diagnosis of complex plasma flows, leading to a new, more detailed understanding of the interaction that occurs in space between a spacecraft and its environmental plasma. Dr. Stone’s work on the plasma wakes of orbiting satellites is internationally recognized. His laboratory research also included the investigation of basic space plasma processes such as collisionless plasma expansion and various plasma wave phenomena. Stone’s demonstration of the presence of collisionless plasma expansion in wakes of test bodies in laboratory experiments, and his subsequent observation of the process in the wake of the Space Shuttle during the Spacelab-2 mission, led directly to its discovery in the wake of the Earth’s Moon in the solar wind (a stream of ionized gas blown out past the planets by the Sun) using instruments on the WIND spacecraft in 1994. Over the next several years, the DIFP was selected for flight on eight space missions, including two early Space Shuttle missions—an orbital test flight in 1982 and Spacelab-2 in 1985. The measurements obtained of the disturbed plasma flow around the Shuttle Orbiter on these missions matched precisely the motions of charged particles observed in the wakes of test bodies in the laboratory—con¬firming the new understanding of plasma wakes suggested by the early laboratory studies. In 1979, NASA Headquarters selected Dr. Stone to serve on the Tethered Satel-lite System Facility Requirements Definition Team, which recommended that NASA develop an Orbiter-based tethered satellite deployment system. In 1980, he was, again, tapped by NASA Headquarters to serve on the Interim Science Advisory Team for the preliminary design phase of the Tethered Satellite System (TSS), and was involved in drafting the NASA-ASI (Italian Space Agency) Memorandum of Understanding which was the basis for cooperation in the bi-national US-Italian TSS program. In 1984, Dr. Stone assimilated a team of internationally prominent scientists to propose the “Research on Orbital Plasma Electrodynamics” investigation, which was one of a dozen science investigations selected by NASA and ASI for the first TSS mission. Beginning in 1985, at the request of his colleagues and NASA Headquarters, he served as the Tethered Satellite System (TSS) Project Scientist and chairman of the TSS Science Investigator Working Group. He then served as Mission Scientist for the first Tethered Satellite mission that flew on the Space Shuttle in 1992 and, again, for the TSS Reflight mission flown on the Shuttle in 1996. See Account of the TSS Program at the link below https://www.marshallretirees.org/an-account-of-the-tethered-satellite-system-program/ The TSS missions resulted in a complete re-evaluation of our understanding of spacecraft charging and current collection in space plasma. These results were presented at a number of national and international science conferences and a collection of papers was published in a special TSS edition of the journal, Geophysical Review Letters under the titled, “TSS-1R: Electrodynamic Tether-Ionospheric Interactions” (GRL 25, no. 4 and 5, February-March 1998) Dr. Stone was also the PI for an experiment launched into orbit in 2000 on the first Air Force Minuteman ICBM to be converted to a launch vehicle, and he provided scientific guidance and instrumentation for the NASA-Marshall ProSEDS program—an electrodynamic tether propulsion demonstration. After retiring from NASA later in 2000, Dr. Stone joined SRS Technologies where his activities included providing technical advice to NASA on advanced in-space propulsion technology and leading the Tether Reboost System study, a concept that could re-boost and maintain the orbit of the International Space Station. He also conceived and patented the SOLEX, a plasma generator designed to enable the high-current electrodynamic tether operations required for in-space propul¬sion applications, and was carried into a developmental program that resulted in a working prototype. He then developed the Magnetospheric Electrodynamic Tether concept that would use the SOLEX to extend the operational range of electrodynamic tethers from low-earth orbit up to synchronous orbit. Dr. Stone has authored more than 150 published scientific papers. He was an adjunct member of the graduate school staff at The University of Alabama Hunts¬ville, where he served on PhD committees. He served on various advisory com¬mittees for NASA Headquarters, and was a technical referee for several scientific journals. He was a member the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Phi Kappa Phi Honorary Society, and the Sigma Xi Research Society. He was presented the AIAA Hermon Oberth Award for outstanding individual contributions to the fields of aeronautics and astronautics (1993); inducted into the UAH Distinguished Engineering Alumni Academy (2001); received a number of NASA awards and certificates, and was awarded the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal (2001). Dr. Stone is married to the former Margaret Jean Russell. They have three mar-ried children Russ (Emily), Rob (Aimee), and Jenny Gibson (Terry), and six grandchildren, Kate, Robert, Lillie, Olivia, Libby, and Jackson. Since retiring from his technical activities, he has served as an elder for the Mayfair Church of Christ in Huntsville and has authored two books. The first, Genesis-1 and Lessons from Space, compares the biblical creation account in Genesis chapter one with what has been learned of the cosmos over the past fifty years of space research and exploration. The second, Beyond the Tree, written for his grandchildren, provides an account of his journey from agnosticism to faith, and a review of the historical evidence for the claims made in the New Testament concerning the man, Jesus of Nazareth. Dr. Stone has traveled throughout the US and to a number of countries lecturing on these subjects.

Starting Year

1962

Last Year Served

2000

Honors

Projects Worked

Employer

NASA

Initial Source

Retirees

Panel #

X

Line #

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