Eugene Shoemaker and his team also led geology field trips for astronauts-in-training in 1967. The goal was to teach them to recognize the features of craters made by both volcanic eruptions and meteor impacts. At that time, there was still debate between scientists about how the Moon got its craters. But Shoemaker was the expert — in fact, the origins of what’s now known as Meteor Crater in Arizona had been uncertain before his Ph.D. dissertation settled the matter.  

During the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, Shoemaker and others from Flagstaff were there in the Science Support Room in the Houston Mission Control Center. In the weeks following the first moonwalk, their studies of lunar rock samples collected by Armstrong and Aldrin resulted in what would be the first of many breakthroughs in astrogeology — the geology of planetary bodies beyond earth.