HOUSTON – The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) probe has been renamed in honor of pioneering astrogeologist Dr. Eugene Shoemaker.

NEAR Shoemaker, as the craft is now known, is orbiting the asteroid Eros about 145 million (233.3 million kilometers) miles from Earth.

Carolyn Shoemaker accepted a plaque on behalf of her late husband that was presented by NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Tuesday morning at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held at Johnson Space Center.

"Many of you heard Gene say for many years that it was important to go to an asteroid," she said. "He would have been really jubilant about the results that I saw today."

"Gene Shoemaker was an inspirational, charismatic pioneer in the field of interplanetary science," said Dr. Carl Pilcher, the space agency’s director for solar system exploration. "It is a fitting tribute that we place his name on the spacecraft whose mission will expand on all he taught us about asteroids, comets, and the origins of the solar system."

Shoemaker was an expert on craters and the impacts that caused them. His 1960s research on the Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona laid the foundation for planetary crater research.

Though health problems kept him from joining the U.S. astronaut corps and going to the moon, Shoemaker trained the Apollo astronauts in craters and lunar geology.

In 1985, Shoemaker was part of a group studying the proposed NEAR mission and defining its objectives.

He and his wife Carolyn, along with David Levy, made up the team who discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy, which later broke up and collided with Jupiter in 1994.

Shoemaker died in a 1997 car accident while studying impact craters in the Australian outback.

The Lunar Prospector carried a small part of the legendary planetary geologist's remains when it was crashed into the moon in a search for water ice that is thought to exist in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles.