Eugene is the Man on the Moon

The crash of Lunar Prospector finds a quiet burial ground for astronomer Eugene Shoemaker. A small vial of Shoemaker's ashes was loaded aboard Lunar Prospector, and now rests with the craft on the surface of the moon. He is the first person to be buried on another planet.



Shoemaker, a brilliant geologist, had hoped to be one of the astronauts who explored the moon in the early 1970's, but was rejected because of a medical condition. He was probably most famous for proving that the huge geological depression in Arizona was actually an impact crater.



Shoemaker Crater in Arizona

He more or less single-handedly created the field of impacts, and he was the one who started bringing to other scientists' and the public's attention the danger of the impacts of comets and asteroids on the Earth.

Mr. Shoemaker was involved in several U.S. space missions, including the Apollo missions -- he taught the astronauts about craters before they left Earth. He and his wife Carolyn also discovered about 800 asteroids and 20 comets -- including the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet that crashed into Jupiter in 1994.

Shoemaker was killed in a car crash in 1997, during an annual trip to Australia in search for asteroid craters. He was 69.

"I don't think Gene ever dreamed his ashes would go to the Moon," Carolyn Shoemaker said shortly before watching Lunar prospector blast-off in January 1998. "He would be thrilled."

"This is so important to us. It brings us a little closure, in a way, to our feelings. We will always know when we look at the moon, that Gene is there."

The polycarbonate capsule containing some of his ashes is one-and-three-quarters inches long and seventh-tenths inch in diameter, is carried in a vacuum-sealed, flight-tested aluminum sleeve mounted deep inside the spacecraft.



Around the capsule is wrapped a piece of brass foil inscribed with an image of a Comet Hale-Bopp, an image of Shoemaker Crater in northern Arizona, and a passage from William 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.



Eugene's final resting ground on the Moon's South Pole.

Lunar Prospector was launched on January 6, 1998, heading for orbit around the moon. The spacecraft has already provided Nasa geeks with global maps of the moon's gravitational and magnetic fields, and a better understanding of the composition of the rocky neighbor of the Earth.

