|
|
|
| Early Days Gerard P. Kuiper Early Graduate Students Missions to the Moon |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
|
Steve Larson, on Kuiper’s search for telescope sites I grew up under Kuiper’s style. Most of the great investigators and scientists at the time of course were very proud of their work and worked hard to maintain their position in the field and all that. But Kuiper was of such stature, all the people in the lab basically went along with what he dictated. He was fully aware of the fact that in the post-Apollo era of NASA it might be difficult to get funding for the kind of research that was going on at the time. So he started looking at other sources. He was spending a fair amount of time with a colleague in Mexico, Guillermo Haro, who was interested in striking up collaboration with American observatories. They had some money at the time to build an observatory, so he spent time site testing for new observatories. He used to fly down to places like Southern Baja with small telescopes, to see what the seeing was like. One of Kuiper’s true legacies was identification and establishment of what are considered now great observatories. He was the primary ruler in establishing Mauna Kea observatory, and in fact the first telescope set up there to do site testing was an LPL telescope, a little 12-inch telescope that was used to determine how good the seeing was. An observer went there for several months out of the year. That kicked things off at what many people now consider now the premier ground-based site. |
Funny as things went, that was sitting on a cinder cone that is now considered sacred, and there is no telescope there. It’s the one peak that has no telescope. All the telescopes are on other ones nearby. He was getting ready to put a proposal to NSF to build telescopes up there with Harvard, and the Hawaiian politicians got involved, saying Hawaii should be involved, so they ended up going another route to develop the telescopes. But he also, in conjunction with the Mexicans, helped established the San Pedro Mártir Observatory in Northern Baja. In fact the crew that attended the telescopes here took a month off and went down there and actually plowed the road to the top. That turned out to be a very good site. He was always looking for high sites. He had looked at the San Francisco peak, Agassiz Peak as a high altitude site. The higher you go, of course, the less water vapor you have to look out through, which absorb infrared radiation, so you want to be in tall mountains. His search for the ideal infrared site was one of the reasons they named the Kuiper Airborne Observatory aircraft, the C-141, which was used with a 36-inch telescope for many years. Of course Kuiper had worked hard to establish the telescopes on the Catalinas, and had in fact, when the Air Force vacated their summit with the radar site, wrote a proposal to use that for a site, which is still used today. |
| Directory | LARS | LPL Library | LPL WebMail | Webmaster | ||
Department of Planetary Sciences Lunar and Planetary Laboratory 1629 E. University Blvd. Tucson AZ 85721 Copyright © 2008 Arizona Board of Regents |