Emerson Press, Cleveland, Ohio Shoemaker, Stephen J.

The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Shoemaker (NEAR Shoemaker), renamed after its 1996 launch in honor of planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker, was a robotic space probe designed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for NASA to study the near Earth asteroid Eros from close orbit over a period of a year.

Must have been a very interesting day in the Shoemaker house.

Similarly, Comet Shoemaker Levy 2 was originally designated asteroid 1990 UL3.

Shoemaker died on July 18, 1997 during one such expedition following a head on car accident while on the Tanami Road northwest of Alice Springs, Australia.

ISBN 1 59376 047 7 (hardcover,) 2006, ISBN 1 59376 116 3 (paperback).

During the period July 16, 1994, to July 22, 1994, over 20 fragments from the comet Shoemaker Levy 9 (SL9, formally designated D 1993 F2) collided with Jupiter's southern hemisphere, providing the first direct observation of a collision between two Solar System objects.

Witness please, Eugene Shoemaker, who, diligently, from a young boy decided he wanted to make maps of celestial bodies.

Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 was the ninth periodic comet (a comet whose orbital period is 200 years or less) discovered by the Shoemakers and Levy, hence its name.

Jupiter orbiting comet Orbital studies of the new comet soon revealed that it was orbiting Jupiter rather than the Sun, unlike all other comets known at the time.

The collision of Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994 was fortuitously timed for astronomers, coming just a few months after Servicing Mission 1 had restored Hubble's optical performance.

This discrepancy may be due to the gravitational attraction of Jupiter, which acts as a kind of barrier, trapping incoming comets and causing them to collide with it, just as it did with Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 in 1994.

The collision of Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994 proved that gravitational interactions can fragment a comet, giving rise to many impacts over a period of a few days if the comet fragments should collide with a planet.

Frequency of impacts SL9 is not unique in having orbited Jupiter for a time five comets, (including 82P Gehrels, 147P Kushida Muramatsu, and 111P Helin Roman Crockett) are known to have been temporarily captured by the planet.

The discovery image gave the first hint that comet Shoemaker Levy 9 was an unusual comet, as it appeared to show multiple nuclei in an elongated region about 50 arcseconds long and 10 arcseconds wide.

Astronomers estimated that the visible fragments of SL9 ranged in size from a few hundred metres to two kilometres across, suggesting that the original comet may have had a nucleus up to acrosssomewhat larger than Comet Hyakutake, which became very bright when it passed close to the Earth in 1996.

Galileo imaged the asteroid 951 Gaspra in 1991 and 243 Ida in 1993, NEAR imaged 253 Mathilde in 1997, Cassini imaged 2685 Masursky in 2000, Stardust imaged 5535 Annefrank in 2002, New Horizons imaged 132524 APL in 2006, Rosetta imaged 2867 Šteins in September 2008 and 21 Lutetia in July 2010, and Dawn orbited Vesta between July 2011 and September 2012.

Several other observers found images of the comet in precovery images obtained before March 24, including Kin Endate from a photograph exposed on March 15, S. Otomo on March 17, and a team led by Eleanor Helin from images on March 19.

By far the most massive planet in the Solar System, Jupiter can capture objects relatively frequently, but the size of SL9 makes it a rarity one post impact study estimated that comets 0.3 km in diameter impact the planet once in approximately 500 years and those in diameter do so just once in every 6,000 years.