Jay Melosh, UA planetary scientist who is well known for his work on impacts and cratering, 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.
As part of the honor, Melosh delivered the annual Shoemaker Memorial lecture last night at ASU. The title of his talk was "Our Catastrophic Solar System: Impacts and the Latest Revolution in Earth Science."
"From the impact-scarred faces of the moon and Mars, to the death of the dinosaurs, impacts have set the course of planetary evolution," says Melosh. "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."
[taken in part from an ASU press release]