Word: kuiper
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...Venus was about 800° F., some scientists expressed the hope that life might exist on its cooler mountaintops or among the water clouds and ice crystals believed to exist in the Venusian atmosphere. But the yellow hue of Venusian clouds has long caused University of Arizona Astronomer Gerard Kuiper, 61, to doubt that they were composed of water in any form...
Split Image. To test his suspicion, Kuiper loaded a team of scientists, a twelve-inch telescope and some complex infra-red instruments into a NASA Convair 990 jet last month and flew along a computer-determined course between Montreal and Lake Superior. At its 37,000-foot altitude, the plane was above 99.5% of the earth's atmospheric water vapor, which ordinarily confuses ground-based astronomers attempting to determine the amount of water on other planets...
Stupendous Collision. To University of Arizona Astronomer Gerard Kuiper, one of the world's leading lunar experts, Orbiter's photograph seemed to confirm his theory that the 1,000-ft.-high mountains in the center of Copernicus were partially formed by volcanic activity. Scattered over their slopes, he says, are humps similar to the cinder cones found on major terrestrial volcanoes. The picture also clearly shows that the floor of the crater is remarkably flat. To Kuiper, this indicates that the subsurface was once in a fluid or plastic state, and that it solidified, causing the crater floor...
These clues strengthen Kuiper's belief that Copernicus was formed by the impact of a comet, one of three or four that have hit the visible side of the moon during its 4½-billion-year lifetime. He estimates that the comet weighed a million million tons, had a nucleus ten miles in diameter, and crashed into the moon at a speed of 35 miles per second. The explosion produced by the stupendous collision was intensified by the comet's high content of ice expanding into steam on impact. The resulting blast produced a crater 60 miles across...
...heat of impact and the resulting steam penetrated deep into the moon and formed a pool of molten material that later solidified as the crater floor. The hot lunar material and huge chunks of rubble floating in it, says Kuiper, created the volcanic structures that can be seen in Orbiter's picture...