Carolyn S Shoemaker

Early and personal life

Carolyn Jean Spellmann was born in Gallup, New Mexico, United States. to Leonard and Hazel Arthur Spellmann. Her family moved to Chico, California, where she and her brother Richard grew up. Carolyn Spellmann earned bachelor's and master's degrees in history, political science, and English literature from Chico State University. Richard went to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. Richard's roommate at Caltech was a young graduate student named Gene Shoemaker. Carolyn did not meet Gene until the summer of 1950, when she attended her brother's wedding. Gene had moved to New Jersey by 1950, to begin work toward a doctoral degree at Princeton University, but flew back to California to serve as Richard's best man. He then returned to his studies at Princeton. However, Carolyn and Gene maintained a "pen pal" relationship. They followed this with a two-week camping trip on the Colorado Plateau. On August 18, 1951, Carolyn and Gene married. Gene Shoemaker was a planetary scientist. She gave birth to three children: Christy, Linda, and Patrick Shoemaker. The family lived in Grand Junction, Colorado, Menlo Park, California, and Pasadena, California, before finally settling down in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she worked in collaboration with her husband at the Lowell Observatory.

Careers

The first job Carolyn held was teaching the seventh grade after marrying Gene. Feeling unsatisfied with the teaching profession, she quit to raise a family. At the age of 51, her children had grown up and moved out, Shoemaker started looking for work that would combat her "empty nest syndrome." In her youth, she had never been interested in scientific topics. She had taken one course in geology, but found it extremely boring. Meeting Gene had changed all that. She reportedly told others that,"listening to Gene explaining geology made what she had thought was a boring subject into an exciting and interesting pursuit of knowledge." A student at Lowell Observatory began teaching her astronomy. Then she began work as a field assistant for her husband, working on his search program mapping and analyzing impact craters. Carolyn Shoemaker started her astronomical career in 1980, at age 51, searching for Earth-crossing asteroids and comets at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, and the Palomar Observatory, San Diego, California. That year, Shoemaker was hired at the United States Geological Survey as a visiting scientist in the astronomy branch, and then in 1989 began work as an astronomy research professor at Northern Arizona University. She concentrated her work on searching for comets and planet-crossing asteroids. Teamed with astronomer David H. Levy, the Shoemakers identified Shoemaker-Levy 9, a fragmented comet orbiting the planet Jupiter on March 24, 1993. After Gene's death in 1997, Shoemaker continued to work at the Lowell Observatory with Levy, and continues to work there today.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Shoemaker used film taken at the wide-field telescope at the Palomar Observatory, combined with a stereoscope, to find objects which moved against the background of fixed stars.

As of 2002, Carolyn Shoemaker had been credited with discovering or co-discovering 32 comets and over 800 asteroids.

Awards

Carolyn Shoemaker received an honorary doctorate from the Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona, and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 1996. She and her husband were awarded the James Craig Watson Medal by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1998. Shoemaker also received the Rittenhouse Medal of the Rittenhouse Astronomical Society in 1988 and the Scientist of the Year Award in 1995.

List of discovered minor planets

Carolyn Shoemaker is credited by the Minor Planet Center with the discovery of 377 numbered minor planets made between 1980 and 1994.