Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
solid bodies is the most fundamental of all processes that have taken place on the
terrestrial planets.” His work, as much as anyone's, led to the third great discovery
we follow in this topic.
Fifty years after their return to the Hopi Buttes, Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker,
faithful field companions always, were in the outback of Australia exploring po-
tential meteorite impact craters. On July 18, 1997, on a rough rural road where the
best driving was in the center, Gene was killed and Carolyn severely injured in an
improbable head-on collision.
On July 31, 1999, the
Lunar Prospector
space probe carried Gene's ashes to the
Moon in a capsule designed by the planetary scientist Carolyn Porco. Once the
probe's instruments had detected water on the Moon, thus completing its scientific
mission, NASA scientists deliberately crashed the spacecraft into a crater near the
Lunar South Pole. Gene Shoemaker thus became the first and only human being,
and perhaps the first and only living creature in the history of the universe, to be
born on one celestial body and buried on another. The capsule carrying Gene's re-
mains contained these lines from
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.
Faithful Companion
We humans have spent vastly more time looking at the Moon than at any other
heavenly body. The stars are too numerous to focus on any one, the Sun too bright
to view directly, and the planets dim specks moving against their stellar back-
ground. Then there is the one and only Moon, our compelling, lovely, mysterious,
obvious, and serene companion. She has inspired poets and lovers, aided early cal-
endar makers, told farmers when to plant, and guided mariners.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was the first to employ the telescope, invented in
Flanders in 1608, to study the Moon. By late 1609 Galileo was already using a
twenty-power telescope to observe the heavens. By focusing on the terminator that
divides the Moon into illuminated and dark regions, where relief stands out the
most, he identified mountains, circular depressions with flat floors, and large dark
regions. To explain these features, Galileo cited the Greeks: “If anyone wanted to
resuscitate the old opinion of the Pythagoreans that the Moon is, as it were, anoth-
