4DLab - Critical Thinking  

What do you know about the first burial on the Moon?

Eugene Shoemaker (1928-1997) is probably mostly remembered because he  confirmed the theory that the huge Arizona crater was formed by the impact of a big meteorite. He also believed that the craters on the Moon were of similar origin.

Panoramic view of the Barringer Crater, also known as Canyon Diablo Crater, Meteor Crater, and Arizona crater. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The Meteor Crater in Northern Arizona was for some time suspected of being produced by some meteor impact, and that it was not the product of volcanic activity. This huge crater was formerly known as the Canyon Diablo Crater, but is also known as Barringer Crater for Daniel Barringer who on 1903 was first to suggest that it was produced by a meteorite impact.

The man was in the habit of thinking deeply and reaching far. In 1960, he demonstrated something that jolted the complacency out of everyone who was paying attention: Earth had been struck by a celestial projectile, measuring 150 feet (45 meters) across and traveling faster than a speeding bullet. And Meteor Crater, a 550-foot-deep, 4,000-foot-wide bowl-shaped depression near Winslow, Arizona, was the scar to prove it. In a single mental leap, Gene had made a connection between the heavens and Earth that no one before him had seen. Terrible destruction could rain down on our planet from above. And he was convinced that the craters on the Moon, widely believed at the time to be the result of explosive volcanic eruptions, were the result of the same cosmic hailstorm.^[1]

Although Shoemaker is also credited for the co-discovery  with his wife astronomer Carolyn Shoemaker (1953-) and astronomer David Levy of the comet Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, there is another aspect of his life that I consider more transcendental than his discovery a comet.

Eugene Shoemaker is also the first and only human
whose ashes have been taken to the Moon.

Shoemaker died on July 18, 1997, in a car accident while he was in Australia searching for undiscovered meteor craters. He had longed to go to the Moon as an Apollo astronaut and study its geology firsthand. Unfortunately, a medical condition diagnosed in the early 1960s prevented him from doing so^[2].

Carolyn Porco's tribute to Eugene Shoemaker

Eugene said shortly before his death the biggest disappointment in his life was “not going to the moon and banging on it with my own hammer.” But Carolyn, his wife, in an act of love and admiration for him, had the idea of fulfilling Eugene's desire (and frustration) by using one of NASA's missions to the Moon to send a portion of Eugene's ashes in a small capsule inside the Lunar Prospector Moon mission that NASA was ready to launch in the next few months.

In his own words, the idea of sending Eugene's ashes to the Moon sparked as follows: "The idea to give Gene Shoemaker the moon as his final resting place came to me on July 19th , the day after Gene died and the moment I read in the morning newspaper that his body would be cremated. ... Shoemaker was finally, in death, granted his wish. On January 6, 1998, a small polycarbonate capsule carrying an ounce of his cremains traveled to the moon aboard NASA's Lunar Prospector spacecraft. Wrapped around the capsule was a 1.5 inch (3.8 cm) square piece of brass foil, laser-inscribed with a composite image designed to commemorate Shoemaker's scientific legacy ^[3]."

The homage that Carolyn paid to Eugene was was well chosen, and with a lot of human love, warmth, and reverence. The three elements on the engraving are: a photo of the comet he discovered, a photo of the Arizona crater he insisted that was of cosmic origin, and a fragment of Shakespeare's  poem.

    And, when he shall die, take him and cut out in little stars: The actual 'burial' of the ashes was going to be a crash of the space probe on the Moon.

    And he will make the face of the heavens so fine the all the world will be in love with night: The heaven's nights now are not the same since there is one of us resting above there.

    And pay no worship to the garnish sun. Now the sun is not the most embellished star in the cosmos, but the Moon.

"On July 31, 1999, after eighteen months of successful orbital scientific operations, Lunar Prospector was commanded to crash into the surface of the Moon. The fulfillment of one man's dream, and the final episode of his inspirational life, met on impact. At his journey's end, thirty years to the month after humans first set foot on the Moon, Eugene M. Shoemaker became the first inhabitant of Earth to be sent to rest on another celestial body."^[2]

But more than "The fulfillment of one man's dream", his burial on the Moon is the product of the love of his wife that wanted him to rest forever in the place where he wished the most: the Moon.

Other space burials

Space burials are not uncommon today, although not having any resemblance with Shoemaker's space burial, because Eugene's ashes were taken directly to the Moon, not to "the space". By "space burials" we mostly understand orbiting the earth until the capsule finally burns into the atmosphere.

In Wikipedia's article Space burial we read:

Space burials are procedures in which a small sample of the cremated ashes of the deceased are placed in a capsule the size of a tube of lipstick and are launched into space.

...

Most burials do not actually leave the gravitational field of the earth but only achieve an orbit around earth. The capsules containing the samples of the remains circle the earth, until the upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere have slowed down the capsules, and they reenter the atmosphere. The capsules burn up upon reentry similar to a shooting star, and the ashes are scattered in the atmosphere. The time between launch and reentry depends on the orbit of the satellite, and can vary widely. The first burial reentered after only 5 years, but other burials are not expected to reenter in less than 250 years.

E. Pérez
jul-10

References
[1] Destination Moon
[2] Eugene Shoemaker: A Tribute .
[3] Eugene Shoemaker Ashes Carried on Lunar Prospector .