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Eugene M. Shoemaker (1928 - 1997)

© Rodolfo Astrada

Man in the Moon

Life is not fair. If it were, some things should never happen, like the untimely loss in a freak automobile accident, of geologist / astrophysicist Eugene Shoemaker. On July 18/1997, near Alice Springs, fate met him while pursuing his annual pilgrimage to Australia in order to work in one of his main lines of research, meteoric impact craters.

That his ashes lie buried in the bottom of a southern lunar crater is only fitting, for he learned to love the moon from his childhood. He tried but could not get a ticket in the Apollo program. Second best was to train moonwalkers as to what to look for, which stones to pick and bring back. Not being able to pound, scratch and taste (yes, taste the grind!!) of lunar rocks, was his single major frustration.

Thanks to the willpower and devotion of former student and research associate Carolyn Porco (currently Imaging team leader for the Cassini Saturn mission), he earned the status of first permanent inhabitant of our natural satellite. A small capsule with his ashes, wrapped in a metal foil engraving depicting Meteor Crater in Arizona, a spectacular portrait of comet Hale Bopp, and a verse from Romeo and Juliet, got a last minute hitch aboard Lunar Prospector Jan 7/1998. Surviving wife Carolyn Shoemaker had to be asked for permission. In her intensive care bed recovering from the accident she could only mutter " ... bless her ..".

After completing an over a year highly successful scientific mission, the oil drum sized spacecraft was directed to crash in the bottom of a permanently shadowed crater on July 31/1999. The rationale: to raise a debris plume, which could be analyzed with Earth based telescopes looking for clues of water vapor. Gene should have been thrilled with this final act, trying to squeeze a little extra science return.

Birth of Astrogeology

This is no place for a biography of Eugene Shoemaker. Abundant references may be found here by Brian Mardsen (JPL), here, etc. Suffice to say that in addition to his MS and Ph.D. degrees in geology, a list of awards from different official and private institutions takes the better part of a printed page.

Most important, Shoemaker was the first scientist who placed celestial collisions in the spotlight. His field research led to the connection of coesite, a metastable form of quartz associated with high pressure / temperature phenomena with meteoric impacts, thus securing the asteroid origin of suspicious formations like Meteor Crater in Arizona, a thesis about which served him to earn a doctorate from Princeton. Before him, volcanism and impact origin were hotly debated as causes for widespread cratering in the moon. The case for impacts was established with his extensive, detailed work.

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