Whose Birthday Is It? December 7, 2018

Gerard Peter Kuiper (1905)

The “father of modern planetary science,” Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper made many discoveries about the solar system, among them the presence of a methane atmosphere around Saturn’s satellite Titan and a carbon dioxide-rich one on Mars and the existence of Uranus’s satellite Miranda and Neptune’s satellite Nereid. He also proposed the existence of a disk-shaped region of minor planets and comets—now called the Kuiper belt—outside Neptune’s orbit. What did he help identify on the Moon? More…