Gerard Kuiper

Gerard Kuiper was a Dutch American astronomer and planetary scientist often called the father of modern planetary science. In 1951 he proposed that a disc of small icy bodies, remnants of the original material that formed the solar system, exists beyond the orbit of Neptune, a region later named the Kuiper belt in his honor when it was confirmed observationally in the 1990s. He discovered two moons, Uranus's moon Miranda and Neptune's moon Nereid, identified carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars, and in 1944 detected methane in the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan. Kuiper earned his doctorate from Leiden University in 1933, directed the Yerkes and McDonald Observatories at various points between 1947 and 1959, founded the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona in 1960 and led it until his death, served as doctoral advisor to Carl Sagan, and helped identify candidate landing sites for the Apollo lunar missions in the 1960s. He died of a heart attack in Mexico City in 1973 at age sixty eight.