page_title: Gerard Kuiper
section_title: Honors
hierarchical_section_title: Gerard Kuiper / Honors
caption_attribution_description: English: The Gerard P. Kuiper Space Sciences building on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona (United States).
context_page_description: Gerard Peter Kuiper was a Dutch astronomer, planetary scientist, selenographer, author and professor. He is the eponymous namesake of the Kuiper belt.
  Kuiper is considered by many to be the father of modern planetary science. As professor at the University of Chicago, he was dissertation advisor to Carl Sagan. In 1958, the two worked on the classified military Project A119, a secret Air Force plan to detonate a nuclear warhead on the Moon.
context_section_description: In 1947, Kuiper was awarded the Prix Jules Janssen of the Société astronomique de France (Astronomical Society of France).
  In 1959, Kuiper won the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society.
  In 1971, Kuiper received the Kepler Gold Medal from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Franklin Institute.
  Besides the minor planet 1776 Kuiper, three craters (Mercurian, lunar, and Martian), Kuiper Scarp in Antarctica, and the now-decommissioned Kuiper Airborne Observatory was also named after him.
  Astronomers refer to a region of minor planets beyond Neptune as the "Kuiper belt", since Kuiper had suggested that such small planets or comets may have formed there. However Kuiper himself believed that such objects would have been swept clear by planetary gravitational perturbations, so that none or few would exist there today.
  The Kuiper Prize, named in his honor, is the most distinguished award given by the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences, an international society of professional planetary scientists.
caption: Gerard P. Kuiper Space Sciences building at the University of Arizona
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