Word: kuiper
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...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...
...Then Kuiper exhibited a series of ten lunar photographs. The first showed a section of the Sea of Clouds about 78 miles square. It was taken when Ranger was still 470 miles away, and Kuiper said that it showed just about as much detail as the best photographs obtainable with the biggest telescopes on earth. Picture by picture, as the spacecraft sped toward the moon, the scene expanded. Craters seemed to blossom on lunar plains that had looked perfectly smooth; in the next pictures even smaller craters appeared...
...cluster of pits showed up with edges that did not look as jagged as those of most lunar craters. As Ranger dropped lower, the clustered craters grew, and one of them showed black dots inside its rim. Nothing of the sort, said Kuiper, had ever before been seen on the moon. His guess was that the pits were made when a giant meteorite hit the moon and dug the conspicuous crater Copernicus, which is surrounded by "rays" that are believed to be splashed-out material. Astronomers used to think that this material was some sort of dust, but Kuiper...
...when Ranger was about 1,000 ft. above the surface, and before impact the scanning beam had time to transmit only a part of it-an area 60 ft. by 100 ft. There, sharp and clear, were tiny craters no more than 3 ft. across. Careful study, said Dr. Kuiper, would almost surely show objects half...
...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...