Voyager 2 V1974 Cygni in the far-ultraviolet. In July 1994, an attempt was made to observe the impacts from fragments of the comet Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with Jupiter. The craft's position meant it had a direct line of sight to the impacts and observations were made in the ultraviolet and radio spectrum. Voyager 2 failed to detect anything with calculations showing that the fireballs were just below the craft's limit of detection. On November 29, 2006, a telemetered command to "Voyager 2" was incorrectly decoded by its on-board computer—in a random error—as a command to turn on the electrical heaters of the
Eugene Merle Shoemaker Institute in 1965. Coming to Caltech in 1969, he started a systematic search for Earth orbit-crossing asteroids, which resulted in the discovery of several families of such asteroids, including the Apollo asteroids. Shoemaker advanced the idea that sudden geologic changes can arise from asteroid strikes and that asteroid strikes are common over geologic time periods. Previously, astroblemes were thought to be remnants of extinct volcanoes — even on the Moon. In 1993, he co-discovered Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 using the 18-inch Schmidt camera at Palomar Observatory. This comet was unique in that it provided the first opportunity to observe the planetary