Gerard Kuiper

Gerard Kuiper was born on December 7th, 1905, and died on December 24th, 1979. He was born in the Netherlands and was the son of a tailor. In 1933 he immigrated to the United States, and became a citizen four years later. In 1944, he was the first to discover that Titan has a atmosphere, an astounding discovery because up to that point, it had been assumed that all the moon's in the solar system had no atmospheres. He seemed to have a knack of discovering atmospheres, because four years later he discovered Mars's CO2 atmosphere, and in the same year he discovered two moons: Miranda and Nereid, belonging to Uranus and Neptune respectively.

In the 1960's, he was part of the lunar Ranger program, and through a series of probes he was able to help pick the prime landing spots for the seven Apollo landers (although only six made it.) as well as the Surveyor missions.

He also was the first speculate that there was a disk of planet like icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune (TNOs), and he was correct, with this area now being called the Kuiper belt.
He has been greatly honored, with NASA's airborne telescope being named “Kuiper Airborne Observatory," as well as the minor planet 1776 Kuiper, he has craters named after him on Mercury, Mars, and the Moon, and of course, the Kuiper Belt.