Word: kuiper
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...know precisely where the Lunik landed. Astronomers from the Ukraine's Kharkov Observatory, who watched and photographed the moon at the moment of impact from a high-flying airplane, think they saw 'a light effect" at the right instant. U.S. astronomers doubt it. Moon Expert Gerard Kuiper of the University of Chicago thinks that no flash of impact would have been visible against the moon's sunlit surface. He questions a Hungarian report of seeing a long-lasting dust cloud on the moon. Since the moon has virtually no atmosphere, dust particles tossed up from the surface...
Nobel Prizewinner Harold Urey of the University of California at La Jolla, another leading moon authority, agrees with Kuiper about there being lava on much of the moon's surface, but he does not think that it welled out of a molten interior. Instead, he contends, it was formed on the spot by the energy of great meteors that hit the moon and melted both themselves and the local lunar rock. He thinks that the present surface material may be something like sand or gravel...
Radioactive Moon. Russia's Lunik carried an instrument to measure the radioactivity of the moon's surface. Neither Kuiper nor Gold believes that it could have worked at the distance (4,660 miles) at which the Lunik swept past the moon, but they would be grateful for any information that the Russians choose to release. Dr. Kuiper believes that the moon's surface is blazing with radioactivity. On the earth, he says, the thick layer of air is the shielding equivalent of 3 ft. of lead or 33 ft. of water, protects the surface from many kinds...
Probably it has no life at all. Dr. Kuiper thinks that it has no water or free oxygen. Radio waves, which penetrate the murky atmosphere, hint that the temperature of the invisible surface is something like 500° F., which is much too high for the earth's kinds of life. Venus rotates only once in several weeks, making the sunlit side much hotter than the dark side, and causing violent storms that sweep perpetually over its hot, dry deserts...
...Urey still thinks that the clouds in the Venusian atmosphere may be made of water droplets like clouds on earth, but few astronomers agree with him. Dr. Kuiper thinks they are made of fine dust particles of carbon suboxide (0302). In an attempt to prove this theory, he made a mixture of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and exposed it to assorted radiation at the Argonne National Laboratory. Sure enough, carbon suboxide formed, and its molecules stuck together to make particles of yellowish polymer...