Renowned US astronomer Eugene Shoemaker, who shared discovery of the comet that crashed into Jupiter in 1994, has been killed in an outback road accident. His wife Carolyn, also an astronomer who shared in the comet discovery, was injured in the crash that occurred on a dirt road about 500km north-west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory close to the Western Australia border. Shoemaker, 69, was killed when the car in which he was travelling was in a head-on collision with another vehicle. Carolyn was been airlifted to hospital where she is in a satisfactory condition. The Shoemakers had been on a two-week working-holiday in Australia, searching for asteroid impact craters in the outback. A geologist by training, Shoemaker was also a leading expert on craters and the interplanetary collisions that caused them. Shoemaker was involved in several US space missions, including the Apollo missions to the moon. He was born on April 28 in 1928 in Los Angeles.
Other important events:
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1877 American inventor Thomas Edison invents the carbon telephone transmitter.
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1934 British King George V opens the Mersey Tunnel, the longest underwater tunnel at the time.
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1969 John Fairfax of England becomes the first person to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean as he arrives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
1972 Cairo orders Soviet Union to withdraw military advisers stationed in Egypt.
1977 Vietnam becomes a member of United Nations.
1980 India launches its first satellite, Rohini.
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1993 Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif resigns and dissolves Parliament.
1998 South African President Nelson Mandela celebrates his 80th birthday by marrying Graca Machel.
2000 Alex Salmond resigns as leader of the Scottish National Party.
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