William Hartmann

I came in ’61, when LPL was located in the Physics, Math, and Meteorology Building, PMM. A group of us were located not in PMM but in a Quonset hut called T6, for Temporary Building Number 6. It was a sort of cylindrical shaped structure, on the present location of the science library. We used to have jokes about Kuiper flying into a tizzy over something and saying “Call T6, call T6,” because a bunch of us graduate students over there were either about to be chewed out or he needed us to do something.

Ewen Whitaker

We started up in very humble surroundings. We had one Quonset hut where the Science Library is now. We started up in this little hut and we set ourselves up there. But at the same time the new Physics and Atmospheric Sciences building—the PMM building it was called in those days, Physics, Maths and Meteorology—had been built and they were just moving in.

The Atmospheric Sciences had got the top floor, the whole top floor, but there was a little piece to the west end there—about the size of a small house—and they said, “Hey, you can have this piece at the end there.”

So we moved into this place from the Quonset huts, and set up our darkrooms and got on with the work of the Lunar Atlas. There’s how it all started. We started off in very modest form with just the six of us.

William Hartmann

At that time if you went into the Steward Observatory library, which I remember doing a lot, and you looked on the shelves, a lot of the astronomical literature was in publications from individual observatories. This was a tradition going back to the 1800s or so, because in those days there weren’t widespread and reliable series of journals. This was typically a European tradition, where great laboratories and observatories had their own series of publications that were sent out around the world to other institutions. Certainly some were very old, over a hundred years old, some of them. And Kuiper was still very much in that European tradition.

So observatories tended to publish their own results, sometimes as little booklets, which would be the product of some big survey program that they had been working. Those were circulated among the observatories.

That was a clear tradition, and Kuiper came in with that image in his head, and started up this Communications of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory series. That was another one of my jobs, actually, being a junior co-editor of that, to help move it along. I’d go over to the printers to deliver copies and bring them back, and sometimes editing, to make sure everything was set up right.

Floyd Herbert

There was a University President in those days, Richard Harvill, who had a lot of ambition for this University. We cheeky graduate students used to make fun of him all the time, but his idea was he was going to make the UA into “The Harvard of the West,” or something like that. So he was very open to creating first-rank departments. People of great ability like Kuiper and Sonett at the Lunar Lab and Aden Meinel at Optical Sciences and the various guys over at Steward would present him with their plans for making their respective departments much more high powered. He was quite supportive of that. That all came from Harvill. He made it all possible.

George Coyne

Finally the Space Sciences Building was built [in 1965], and we all moved in there. There was enthusiasm about all the research. Tom Gehrels was extremely active. Elizabeth Roemer is one of the best comet astronomers in the world. The Department was essentially Tom Gehrels, Elizabeth Roemer, Ewen Whitaker, Bob Strom, and then he had a lot of non-faculty positions, a lot of research positions. They were filled by younger people.

Very soon Kuiper built up some real strengths. He hired Frank Low, who was eminent. Frank Low was developing the whole field of infrared astronomy, which from that time became a very important field. In fact, although it was called the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, a lot of the research there was on non-planetary objects. Frank was there for many years in that Department, in that research group, but he was doing a lot of work on stars, on any kind of infrared source that was significant. The research was really front-line. The whole selection of sites for the Moon, the first landing on the Moon and all—that research group contributed a lot to that program. That was the early years of LPL.

Harold Larson

This building was built by NASA to provide a place in this country for planetary science to be conducted away from astronomers, because astronomers looked down on planetary people. Astronomers didn’t let planetary people have time on telescopes. Astronomers thought that the planets weren’t very interesting and asteroids were worse—stars and galaxies, these were the things that warranted those resources.

NASA of course saw the need to do supporting observations because of the space program that was just coming on line, the Apollo mission to the Moon. Nobody had maps of the Moon; nobody knew what the Moon was made out of. To take pictures and to try to understand more detail of what the Moon was going to be like when we landed on it, NASA created this place.

Kuiper populated it with people like Ewen Whitaker and Bob Strom and Tom Gehrels and Pat Roemer, all of whom were doing things that complemented each other, all of which were deemed important to provide background information for the space program. NASA built a telescope that accompanied the building, which is the 61-inch up in the Catalinas. That was dedicated to planetary work. It was a place in the country where planetary astronomy and supporting planetary research could be conducted without the interference and constraints that typically applied in other institutions where astronomy was king.

John Lewis

There was a conference here in Tucson called the Arizona Conference on Planetary Atmospheres, and as a graduate student who was working on the chemistry of Venus I came to the conference and presented a paper. Gerard Kuiper, the Head of the Department, was at the conference, and he invited me to come over and tour the lab. It was a fairly new building. It had been occupied only about three years; very up-to-date, beautiful astronomical facilities. He showed me the shops down in the basement where they processed mirrors and optics and so on.

That evening tour ended in his office. He had his office set up sort of like a church. There was a raised alter at the front of the room—a very long room—and he had a little living room set up at one end. There was a raised dais about a step high, where his desk was, down at the end of the room. Then he had the flag of Arizona and the flag of the United States on either side of his desk. You felt like saluting when you came into the room. I should have caught a clue from these circumstances that this was an unusual operation.

Charles Wood

Kuiper was very much interested in art. He studied to be a painter when he was young, and he always tried to have artists around him. In fact, he had a little cottage in the backyard of his house on Sawtelle Avenue, and he gave it free to a guy that I met, who was an artist. He wanted to have artists and art in his life. He was very interested in music and things like that. He was sort of the old fashioned gentlemen scholar, I think.

He also hired a sculptor, Ralph Turner. Ralph was hired to take the photographs of the Moon that we had from telescopes and from some spacecraft, and to make three-dimensional models of those objects—of craters, or of mountains on the Moon—and then he would have a light source that would have the light shining on his model the same angle it was for each of the photographs that we had.

He would continually change his model until it matched every photograph that he had, and then that would be an accurate model of that feature on the Moon. Then we could measure the angels, the slopes of the features, and the depths of them and whatnot.

It was a very unusual way of finding out about the topography of the Moon. If you go in the Lunar Lab, on the main floor there’s a grey model on the wall—it must be about six or eight feet across—and that’s one of Ralph’s, one of his models of a peak on the Moon. It’s still there.

Alika Herring was another one of these strange guys that Kuiper latched onto. He was from Hawaii, and he made his living doing two things. He played the Hawaiian steel guitar, and he made telescopes. He ground mirrors for telescopes and worked for a company that made telescopes for amateur astronomers.

He made a telescope for one of the Ranger spacecraft, I believe, that went to the Moon, and then he stayed on and he made drawings of the Moon using the photographs and using visual observations with some of the Lunar Lab telescopes. That was another sort of unusual thing, a throwback to the past. It used to be the way people studied the Moon a hundred years ago was by making drawings. Kuiper made the first really high-quality photographic atlas of the Moon, but he also was willing to have somebody who had keen eyesight and good telescopes to make drawings as well.

Harold Larson

I was one of the few people who could write a program in Fortran, and use the very few computers that existed. It was that combination of background and skills that allowed me to step in and take over Kuiper’s [airborne spectroscopy] project.

I remember asking him, “You know, I’ve never had…” I don’t know if I said this, but I didn’t think I could name the nine planets.

He said, “It doesn’t matter. You learn planetary science by doing it.”

To this day, the department says we don’t offer an undergraduate minor or major in planetary science because you should be good at something else. Be a good physicist, a good chemist, geoscientist, and you can pick up the planetary stuff on the job. Kuiper saw no problem with hiring me without any background in astronomy. In fact, it’s not been a limitation.

William Hubbard

I talked to Kuiper some about his philosophy of planetary exploration. He said, “What do humans do when they get to a new place? The first thing they do is look around. You have to be able to look around.”

I was trained as a traditional astrophysicist. Astrophysicists don’t look at pretty pictures. They look at data and they apply high-powered mathematics to analyze the data and infer basic physical processes. Just looking at pictures isn’t going to get you anywhere.

That was part of the, I might say contempt, that the astrophysicists had for planetary scientists back in those days, is that all they were doing was looking at pictures and they weren’t doing fundamental science.

You have to disagree with that when you start seeing pictures like the Cassini pictures which show such intricate physical processes; for example, the rings of Saturn. There’s so much beautiful physics being exhibited there, and certainly even in landforms on satellites. So I think that was a rather unenlightened point of view, which probably originated with just the low resolution of images available from spacecraft in those days.

Robert Strom

Even before we had the lunar orbiter, there was a program here which I was involved in to obtain high resolution telescopic images from the Earth. That was done right here in the Catalina Mountains, with a telescope that Kupier had built and was sponsored by NASA. We went up almost every night to photograph the Moon at the highest resolution we could and produced an atlas from that.

William Hartmann

In the mid-sixties, when I was still a graduate student, I have distinct memories of walking across the campus and looking up and seeing the daytime Moon in the Arizona sky very clearly. I’d be thinking to myself, gee, it’s only going to go around maybe 60 times before we actually try to land on it. Having grown up looking at the Moon through my telescope in the backyard and making drawings of the craters and so forth, it was kind of a personal relationship with the Moon.

Michael Drake

In Kuiper’s day, it was initially planetary astronomy. He realized that going to the Moon you were looking at a rocky body. He brought in some of the first planetary geologists. Bob Strom is the most prominent of those—to this day he’s the world’s expert on Mercury, and the guy who figured out that Venus was resurfaced a few hundred million years ago.

Kuiper’s appreciation of geology actually came from a very odd thing. He got it in his head, correctly, that Mauna Kea in Hawaii would be a great astronomical observatory site. In the process of looking at Mauna Kea, he flew over the lava flows in Hawaii. He recognized what lava flows looked like from the air, and then when he looked through telescopes and subsequently orbiting spacecraft at the Moon, he realized he was looking at lava flows.

That sounds like a simple thing now—we all know the dark areas of the Moon are made of basaltic lava—but in the 1960s, before Apollo, there were other thoughts. Harold Urey, Kuiper’s great competitor—along with Kuiper one of the two founders of planetary science—thought the Moon was completely primitive, undifferentiated. He called it a Rosetta Stone: You could see what all the original building blocks looked like if you went to the Moon. But Kuiper knew what lava flows looked like from above, and realized he was seeing lava flows out there.

Paul Geissler

When Gerard Kuiper first got here, his charge was to map the Moon, and understand the geology of the Moon well enough to be able to land a person on it, because this was imminent. They were going to land somebody on there, and one of the hypotheses at the time was that the thing was just an electrostatically-charged clump of dust, and as soon as you stepped out of your spacecraft you were going to fall into dust as high as your eye.

It was an unlikely theory, but there was no way to prove it wrong, because nobody had done the research. And we were just a few years away from landing somebody there. That was why LPL got started to begin with, so one of the tasks was to make really good maps of the Moon and be able to choose places to land.

What they would do is go out to the telescope and take these gorgeous pictures of it, but of course it was what we call a point-perspective projection. It’s not even a round globe; it’s just what you see. What they would do is put those in a slide projector, take them down to the basement, and in the basement of LPL—I think it’s still hanging up there now—is a round sphere. They’d go way across the building and project this thing onto the sphere from a distance, and come around and take photographs of the sphere. They’d be able to get various perspectives of the Moon that you wouldn’t be able to see from Earth. Things that looked like ovals would become circles. The things those guys did in the days before digital image processing were amazing.

Harold Larson

This was an exciting period of time when things were being done for the first time. In that kind of environment, this is where discoveries are made. If you’re the first person to ever look at something with a particular technique and a particular wavelength region, with some resource that no one has ever had access to before, the easy things are hanging there waiting to be plucked.

Kuiper and Frank Low and us—myself and the men who worked with me—we were plucking all the easy things. We were discovering water on Jupiter and a lot of things that with hindsight were easy. But back then none of us really felt comfortable. We were always pushing the limit of something, and never knew what was going to happen, and always surprised and amazed that we were achieving results that got national attention. It was a privileged time to be working in science.

Robert Strom

Kuiper passed away at Christmas time, in Mexico, in 1973. That was just after the launch [of Mariner 10]. The first encounter with Mercury was March of ’74, so he missed it. That was a shame; he never got to see Mercury. But he had a crater named after him both on Mars and on Mercury.

Ewen Whitaker

Round about the time Kuiper died, we were beginning to get in people from outside with these other fields. The whole subject was already expanding with all this stuff, especially that came back from Apollo with all the samples, a huge amount of geophysics and oh, just the whole plethora of subjects that were coming along. People were being hired at LPL to take over or help with these other, outside subjects. So from then on we started expanding in all fields.