Kuiper Space Sciences Building (Tucson, Arizona)

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This building is the home of the UA Lunar and Planetary Lab (LPL) and was named after Gerard Kuiper who founded the LPL in 1960, when he moved to Tucson for the clear skies. Kuiper and his team at the LPL were in charge of the science of the Ranger missions, the first missions that attempted to send a man-made object to the moon. They helped prove that a spacecraft could land safely on the moon with the Surveyor missions, and selected the landing sites for the Apollo missions. The U of A led the successful Phoenix Mars mission that landed on Mars in 2008 and proved that there was frozen water at the Martian pole. As of 2016, the U of A is leading the OSIRIS-REx mission. For the first time in the history of planetary exploration, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will take a pristine sample from a primitive carbonaceous asteroid and return it to Earth.