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Gerard P. Kuiper   Early Graduate Students   Missions to the Moon   Telescopes & Research

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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.

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