Word: kuiper
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...angle lens from about 10 ft. above a porous, pumicelike surface, the pictures showed a barren, forbidding crust, littered with jagged rocks and tiny pebbles that the Russians later revealed were as small as 1 or 2 millimeters wide. The lunar view suggested to University of Arizona Astronomer Gerald Kuiper that Luna 9 was probably resting on the floor of a small crater, that the rocks were only about a foot high, and that the horizon in the picture was actually formed by the crater's rim, apparently less than a mile away...
...Small Star. To Astronomer Gerard Kuiper, who directs the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, there is only one satisfactory answer. "Like a small star," he says, "Jupiter is still contracting somewhat under the force of its own gravity." As the planet contracts, Kuiper speculates, the compressed and solid hydrogen mantle that envelops its molten core occasionally cracks open, releasing the vast amounts of heat that brew Jupiter's mysterious storms...
...second before Ranger collided with the onrushing moon its cameras were snapping closeups of moon segments no larger than a city block. Even so, after scanning the lunar snapshots, scientists were still undecided whether the moon's surface would support a spacecraft. A "personal guess" by Dr. Gerard Kuiper, head of the scientific team analyzing the evidence, was that the moon is coated with a frothy substance that "may hide many treacherous things." The University of California's Dr. Harold Urey argued on the other hand that photographs of several craters showed "a whitish button...
Atop Hawaii's clear, cloud-free Mauna Kea (13,784 ft.), new telescopes sweep the skies from a site that Astronomer Gerard Kuiper terms "the finest in the world-I repeat, in the world." Five space-tracking stations in the islands now spot missiles and satellites. A hundred miles northeast of the island of Maui, a place where the ocean is three miles deep has been chosen for the $71 million Project Mohole-an attempt to drill three miles through the earth's crust to the underlying mantle. A recent business-sponsored survey projected a possible annual income...
...important Ranger observation was the great number of small secondary craters that litter some parts of the moon. They seem to have fairly steep slopes that might topple any spacecraft that attempts to land on them. Dr. Kuiper thinks that regions splashed with rocks tossed out of big craters should be studiously avoided, but other parts of the lunar plains are probably smooth enough for landing. An encouraging sign is the comparative scarcity of small primary craters blasted by meteor impacts...