Harold Urey
Harold Clayton Urey (April 29, 1893 – January 5, 1981) was an American physical chemist whose pioneering work on isotopes earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for the discovery of deuterium. He played a significant role in the development of the atom bomb, but may be most prominent for his contribution to theories on the development of organic life from non-living matter.
Born in Walkerton, Indiana, Urey studied thermodynamics under Gilbert N. Lewis at the University of California. After he received his PhD in 1923, he was awarded a fellowship by the American-Scandinavian Foundation to study at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. He was a research associate at Johns Hopkins University before becoming an associate professor of Chemistry at Columbia University. In 1931, he began work with the separation of isotopes that resulted in the discovery of deuterium.
During World War II Urey turned his knowledge of isotope separation to the problem of uranium enrichment. He headed the group located at Columbia University that developed isotope separation using gaseous diffusion. The method was successfully developed, becoming the sole method used in the early post-war period. After the war, Urey became professor of chemistry at the Institute for Nuclear Studies, and later Ryerson professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago.
Urey (crater)
Urey is a lunar impact crater located in the narrow niche of terrain between the western halves of the craters Rayleigh and Lyapunov. It lies near the east-northeastern limb of the Moon, and thus appears very foreshortened when viewed from the Earth.
The rim of Urey has outward bulges along the western and southeastern sides. There are no notable craters along the rim or inner wall. However, there are a few small craterlets on the interior floor, including a crater at the northern end of the central ridge. This range of low hills divides the floor in half, running north-south for a distance of about one third the crater diameter.
This crater was previously designated Rayleigh A, a satellite of Rayleigh, before being given its current name by the IAU.
