It was Shoemaker who demonstrated in 1960 that features like Meteor Crater in Northern Arizona are produced by impacts and not volcanic activity. He believed that the same held true for the craters on the Moon and wanted to test his theory by going there.
He convinced NASA that the Apollo program should focus on scientific investigation, and wanted to become the first geologist on the Moon. Unfortunately, he developed Addison's disease, which prevented him from becoming the first geologist on the Moon. Instead, he trained the Apollo astronauts to recognize and retrieve rocks of geologic interest, and during the moon walks, he sat beside Walter Cronkite giving geologic commentary.
Gene Shoemaker devoted his life's work to investigating the geology of solar system bodies. In 1993, he, along with his wife, Carolyn, and Tucson astronomer David Levy, discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.
Carolyn Porco had gotten to know Shoemaker during her grad student days at CalTech and when they both served on the imaging team of the Voyager mission to the outer planets.
After talking with his family and NASA and receiving the go-ahead to prepare a tribute to send to the moon, Porco scrambled to get it ready for what looked like a September launch.
She had a 1.5-inch square of brass foil laser inscribed with an image of Hale-Bopp, the last comet that the Shoemakers observed together, and with Shoemaker's favorite photo of Meteor Crater in northern Arizona where he had trained the Apollo astronauts. In the center is a passage from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet:
And, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
The foil is wrapped around a tiny capsule that Porco and the family filled with Shoemaker's ashes just a day before it was due at NASA's Ames Research Center in California.
After a launch delay, the Lunar Prospector finally took off in January 1998 and, now, after spending the past 18 months orbiting the Moon, it will be commanded to crash into a crater near the lunar south pole.
Porco remembers, "Only two years before he died, Gene said, "Not going to the Moon and banging on it with my own hammer has been the biggest disappointment in life.' I felt that this was Gene's last chance to get to the moon and it would be a fitting tribute to a man who was a pioneer in the exploration of the solar system."
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