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Lunar Impact Site Named After Sally Ride. Dec. 18, 2012: NASA has named the site where twin gravity probes hit the Moon yesterday in honor of the late astronaut, Sally K. Ride, who was America's first woman in space and a member of the probes' mission team.
She was 61. The cause was pancreatic cancer, her company, Sally Ride Science, announced on its Web site. Dr. Ride, a physicist who was accepted into the space program in 1978 after she answered a newspaper ad for astronauts, flew on the shuttle Challenger on June 18, 1983, and on a second mission in 1984.