UA News

The award recognizes H. Jay Melosh for his research on meteorite impacts.

University of Arizona planetary scientist and impact specialist H. Jay Melosh is this year's recipient of the Eugene Shoemaker Memorial Award presented by the BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University.

The Eugene Shoemaker Memorial Award is presented each year to a leading scientist in honor of his or her life and work.

Melosh, a Regents' Professor of planetary sciences and scientist with the UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, is widely known for his research on impact cratering, planetary tectonics, and the physics of earthquakes and landslides. His research themes include the giant impact origin of the moon, the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary impact that extinguished the dinosaurs, the ejection of rocks from their parent bodies, and the origin and transfer of life between the planets.

Shoemaker, a legendary scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey Astrogeology program in Flagstaff, pursued his lifelong passion of geologic studies to help understand impact craters with his wife and science partner, Carolyn Shoemaker.

The Shoemakers, along with their friend David Levy of Tucson, discovered comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the comet that collided with Jupiter in multiple impacts in 1994.

"The study of meteorite impacts has evolved from the obscure pastime of a few visionary scientists a half century ago to the forefront of modern research," Melosh said in an ASU news release.

"From the impact-scarred faces of the moon and Mars, to the death of the dinosaurs, impacts have set the course of planetary evolution," he added.

"We now believe that the moon itself was born in a planetary-scale impact between the Earth and a Mars-size protoplanet about 4.5 billion years ago.

"Impacts have brought us samples of Mars and the moon in the form of meteorites and may have transferred life from Earth to Mars or vice versa," Melosh said. The transfer of life between Mars and Earth is something that Shoemaker himself speculated on in 1965, he added.

"Even now, asteroids that cut across the Earth's orbit are being catalogued as potential threats to our civilization," Melosh said.

"It is particularly fitting to present the Shoemaker Award to Jay Melosh in the year of Darwin's bicentenary," said Paul Davies, professor and director of the BEYOND Center in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, "because Melosh was the first person to recognize that cosmic collisions can transfer life between Mars and Earth.

"It is now generally acknowledged that microbes can hitchhike on rocks blasted into space by big impacts, and travel across the solar system," Davies said.

Melosh is a science team member of NASA's Deep Impact mission that successfully cratered comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005.

Melosh received the Hess Medal from the American Geophysical Union in 2008, the Gilbert Prize from the Geological Society of America in 2001 and the Barringer Medal from the Meteoritical Society in 1999. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Humboldt Fellow at the Bavarian Geological Institute. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2003. The asteroid 8216 was named "Melosh" in his honor.

Melosh also is a fellow of the Meteoritical Society, the Geological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Melosh received a doctorate in physics and geology from the California Institute of Technology and a bachelor's degree in physics from Princeton University. He has published more than 170 technical papers, edited two books and is the author of "Impact Cratering: A Geologic Process." He is writing a new book titled "Planetary Surface Processes."

Melosh delivered the annual Shoemaker Memorial Lecture at ASU last week. He titled his talk "Our Catastrophic Solar System: Impacts and the Latest Revolution in Earth Science."

Last year's Shoemaker award recipient was geologist Walter Alvarez, author of "T. rex and the Crater of Doom." In 2007, Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt was the first recipient of the award.

The BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science is a pioneering international research center established in 2006 at ASU. This "cosmic think tank" is specifically dedicated to confronting the big questions raised by advances in fundamental science, and facilitating new research initiatives that transcend traditional subject categories.