before the crewed Moon landings, He was awarded the John Price Wetherill Medal from the Franklin Institute in 1965. Coming to Caltech in 1969, he started a systematic search for Earth orbit-crossing asteroids, which resulted in the discovery of several families of such asteroids, including the Apollo asteroids. Shoemaker advanced the idea that sudden geologic changes can arise from asteroid strikes and that asteroid strikes are common over geologic time periods. Previously, astroblemes were thought to be remnants of extinct volcanoes – even on the Moon. Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 In 1993, he co-discovered Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 using the 18-inch Schmidt camera at Palomar Observatory. This comet was unique in that it provided the first opportunity to observe the planetary impact of a comet. Shoemaker–Levy 9 collided with Jupiter in July 1994. The resulting impact caused a massive "scar" on the face of Jupiter. Death Shoemaker spent much of his later years searching for and finding several previously unnoticed or undiscovered impact craters around the world. He died on July 18, 1997, during one such expedition in a head-on car collision on the remote Tanami Track, a few hundred kilometers northwest of Alice Springs, Australia. Shoemaker's wife Carolyn was severely injured in the crash. On July 31, 1999, some of his ashes were carried to the Moon by the Lunar Prospector space probe in a capsule designed by Carolyn Porco. Celestis, Inc. provided the service—at NASA's request—commercially, making Shoemaker's ashes the first private delivery to the lunar surface. Celestis is the memorial spaceflight company that flew the ashes of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry into space, as well as Star Trek actor James Doohan (“Scotty”), Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper and hundreds of other people from around the world. Shoemaker is the only person whose remains have been placed on any celestial body outside Earth. The brass foil wrapping of Shoemaker's memorial capsule is inscribed with images of Comet Hale–Bopp ("the last comet that the Shoemakers observed together"), the Barringer Meteor Crater, and a quotation from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet reading The fatal crash happened when Hale-Bopp was still visible to the naked eye, having passed perihelion and having moved into the southern celestial hemisphere. Awards and tributes Shoemaker received a large number of awards for his professional work. According to the obituary published by the USGS Astrogeology Science Center, these included: Doctorate of Science, Arizona State College, Flagstaff, 1965. John Price