Dr. Gene Shoemaker mapped the moon, trained astronauts and discovered more than 800 asteroids. He was also the first person to go to the moon… and stay there.

Shoemaker started his career with a bang, proving with his Princeton dissertation that the mile-wide Barringer Crater in Arizona, previously attributed to volcanic activity, was in fact the result of a meteorite impact.

Soon after, he founded the astrogeology program of the U.S. Geological Survey, in part to better understand the potential threat of future meteorites.

He led a team to map the craters of the moon, then was called to advise the Apollo space program, training its astronauts for their lunar geological surveys.

He and his wife Carolyn co-discovered the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet and predicted its impact with Jupiter, which the world watched through the Hubble Telescope.

At 64, he received the National Medal of Science, capping a career of awards.

At 69, while exploring a meteorite crater in Australia, Shoemaker’s life was cut short in a car crash.

He often said his one regret was not going to the moon to experience its geology himself. So NASA decided to grant his wish.

They placed a small capsule of his ashes inside the Lunar Prospector research spacecraft. It orbited the moon for 18 months of exploration, then deliberately crash-landed into a lunar crater where Shoemaker is now interred, the first human remains on the moon.