Impact event such as Engelier and Gerin on Iapetus, Mamaldi on Rhea and Odysseus on Tethys and Herschel on Mimas form significant surface features. 2018 models developed to explain the unusual spin of Uranus support a long-held theory that this was caused by an oblique collision with massive object twice the size of Earth. On July 1994, Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 was a comet that broke apart and collided with Jupiter, providing the first direct observation of an extraterrestrial collision of Solar System objects. The event served as a "wake-up call", and astronomers responded by starting programs such as Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research
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