The University of Arizona
The Evolution of LPL: 1973-2000



Ground-Based Research
The Department   Graduate Students   Spacecraft Missions  

Richard Greenberg, on the Miranda plates
For my thesis at MIT I did things that were very similar to the same topics as what inspired me in the first place, orbital resonances of planets and satellites. I continued to work on those kinds of things [at LPL]. There were some plates that Kuiper had taken, photographic plates, down in the basement. He discovered Miranda, one of the moons of Uranus. The discovery plates, and plates that he’d taken over the course of a couple years afterwards—I guess he took them during the forties, probably—those glass plates were still down there.


Ewen Whitaker and I did some careful measurements of the position of Miranda, and we were able to determine some things about its orbit—its eccentricity and the inclination of its orbit. Those proved to be true. That was interesting because that was the early seventies and we were using those plates from the late forties. I guess those plates must be gone now, or in some cardboard box.