Gene Shoemaker

It has been three months since I embarked on my current ship and trough all this time I have not watched a single movie from my huge collection (amassed during vacation for eventual watching later) because I was either too exhausted with working every day or simply was too occupied with my books that I passionately read each night before falling into sleep. Now I just had crossed Atlantic and arrived in Caribbean area. 

One single movie that appealed to me - so I stole some time from my sleep - was "National Geographic" documentary about Asteroids. Even now I can't tell the difference between Asteroids and Comets but what fascinated me was the main protagonist of this documentary, American geologist Gene Shoemaker who was filmed while explaining his theories about our our planet still bearing visible traces of ancient impacts from Asteroids - they can be seen in deserts and all over the world, where people earlier assumed they must be volcanoes and in fact he explains, they are scars from out of space. He also explains Moon is full of these scars and his research was proved in 1993 when a comet (baring his name) hit directly into Jupiter and explosions was seen from telescopes around the world. 

What particularly impressed me (besides the interesting story itself) was personality of Shoemaker - when this documentary was filmed he was already an elderly gentleman but he had a contagious energy, enthusiasm and spirit of a young man - his eyes twinkling with excitement, he was explaining everything with lots of humour, spark and such charm that I absolutely loved him - some people were born with this gift to be immensely likable (it takes lots of effort to keep this spirit high, in spite of everything life throws at us). Not that Shoemaker had it easy - all his life he dreamt about being the first geologist who will step on the Moon, just to find out his health problems disqualify him forever from this, so he continued with teaching and training others who would live his dream. I would have probably just die from disappointment but Shoemaker bravely continued his research, together with his wife from some small telescope and travelling around the world in search of stones with visible traces of shocked quartz, the material resulting from Asteroid impacts. He actually found a lot of these, even in the most unexpected places like a town in Germany (visibly rising from something looking like volcano crater) where central church was built from such stone. Out of curiosity I checked the Internet to find out is he still alive and to my biggest sorrow found out that this wonderful man has perished in a car accident during one of his scientific travels somewhere in Australia (Americans drive on different side of the road) - he was greatly loved by his colleagues and not only there are several Asteroids named after him but his ashes were sent to the Moon (which I find deeply moving, as in life he couldn't travel there) with inscription from Shakespeare that brings tears to my eyes. What a wonderful, wonderful man.