By Sylvia Kuiper des Tombe (daughter of astronomer Gerard Kuiper)
In 1951, when I was just four, Papá hypothesized that there must be a belt of objects beyond Pluto to account for its strange behavior. Papá’s biographer for NASA, Dr. Dale Cruikshank, explains: “Kuiper theorized about the existence of many small, icy bodies in the region of Pluto in the outer Solar System, noting that comets with periods of about 200 years or less appear to come from such a region.” When I visited Hawaii in 1998 to see the observatories on Mauna Kea (the site where Papá, along with an assistant, had conducted the first astronomical tests in 1964), I met David Jewitt, who discovered the first object in this region other than Pluto, and he presented me with a photo of it. That area is now known as the Kuiper Belt.
With one of my children and his family, I was a guest at the “Pluto Flyby Encounter” (July 13-14, 2015) at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and each member of the Horizons Missions team was wearing a t-shirt with a badge proclaiming “Pluto-Kuiper Belt” as the object of the mission. We were very proud! Read More
(reprinted from the Subud USA Newsletter)