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

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Ewen Whitaker It really dates back to 1955, when I went to a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Dublin, Ireland. I’d heard that Gerard Kuiper was going to be there, which was fortunate because I knew that he was interested in the Moon and planets. He put out this little memo: “I’m interested in making an atlas with the best pictures that have been taken from the Mt. Wilson, the Pic-du-Midi observatories, and anyone interested in giving some guidelines, please get in touch after the meeting.” Well, I got back home and I thought, “This is good, I’m interested in the Moon as a sideline, let me write to Kuiper.” So I wrote him a long letter in longhand, and I said: This is good, I’d be happy to help, I don’t approve of this idea, let’s have the sheets of paper this way around rather than this way, and of course he wrote back. I was the only one who wrote to him out of all the astronomers at that meeting. Four hundred astronomers, but not one was interested in the Moon. I was the only one. In 1957, I had all these pictures of the Moon I’d been taking with a telescope in Texas, with the 82-inch. [Kuiper said] “Can you come out for a month? I can pay for you to come out for a month and print up all the negatives of the Moon that I’ve taken.”	I was at the Greenwich Observatory in those days in Herstmonceux in Sussex, and I’d just got a young baby there, or the wife had. I said, “Okay, we’ll come out for a month and print out your pictures.” So out I went, and it was rather funny because in the London Airport, Sputnik 1 had just gone up and there were big banner headlines: Sputnik 1, the Russians, the Space Race. I got a copy of the newspaper and took it on the overnight flight. In the morning we landed in Chicago and met Kuiper—he came in from Yerkes to pick me up at the airport—and I gave him the paper and he said, “Oh, I haven’t even heard about this. This is big news.” Dale Cruikshank After Percival Lowell wrote all these crackpot books about Mars, planetary science had no reputation and nobody wanted to touch the field with a ten-foot pole. By the fifties, there were only two people in the field of any note. One of them was Gerard Kuiper and the other was Harold Urey, who had already won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. The two of them actually for a while were both at the University of Chicago. Urey went off to UC San Diego and Kuiper came here to Arizona, and essentially started two competing schools in planetary sciences.

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