David Levy talks of friend Carolyn Shoemaker during a private memorial ceremony for the late Flagstaff astronomer. Levy, and Shoemaker, along with Shoemaker’s late husband, Gene Shoemaker, discovered the Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet that impacted Jupiter almost 30 years ago.
David Levy talks of friend Carolyn Shoemaker during a private memorial ceremony for the late Flagstaff astronomer. Levy, and Shoemaker, along with Shoemaker’s late husband, Gene Shoemaker, discovered the Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet that impacted Jupiter almost 30 years ago.
Next week marks the 30th anniversary of the date that Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker began their ascendancy from well-known scientists to world-famous legends. They had long been cemented as leading figures in the field of astrogeology � the geology of celestial bodies in our solar system. But it was their discovery of a comet on the evening of March 24, 1993, that captured the attention of people around the world while giving Gene a life-coming-full-circle experience.
Four decades before their great discovery, Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker were in the early years of their marriage, and Gene was in a similar, nascent stage of his career as a geologist. He studied impact craters around the world, proved the impact origin of Meteor Crater, searched for potential Earth impacting asteroids and comets in the sky, and relocated the United States Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Branch to Flagstaff as a center for preparing the geological exploration of the moon for the Apollo program.
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