Eugene Shoemaker is one of the most renowned American geologists and astronomers of the last century. He brought the debate around the origin of Arizona’s Meteor crater to an end, helped pioneer an entirely new field of science and co-discovered one of the most scientifically impactful comets ever found. He was born in California in 1928 and attended the California Institute of Technology at the age of 16, completing a Geology bachelor's degree. He then took only one more year to complete his master’s at Caltech, his thesis being the petrology of Precambrian metamorphic rocks in New Mexico. Shoemaker then went on to work for the United States Geological Society (USGS) searching for deposits of uranium which eventually led him to nuclear testing
