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NASA placed aboard the Moon probe Lunar Prospector an ounce of the cremated remains of a man NASA scientists called a "great founder" of planetary science. The ashes are the remains of Eugene Shoemaker who was a co-discoverer of Shoemaker-Levy 9, a comet that crashed into Jupiter in 1995. The crash, captured by the lenses of the Hubble Space Telescope, established Shoemaker as "one of the great founders of planetary science." OTHER ASHES ORBIT EARTH Lunar Prospector's science instruments were provided by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of California Berkeley Space Science Laboratory, the University of Arizona at Tucson, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center at Greenbelt, Maryland, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of technology at Pasadena, California. Science work is at the Lunar Research Institute, Gilroy, California, while the flight is managed at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. |
