And as a result of a Google search trying to remember "Henbury" I did run across this interesting 'interview' with Carolyn Shoemaker which references a visit there.

 http://www.geotimes.org/jan04/feature_Carolyn.html

.. . .
As well the potential to purchase bits of Henbury meteors.
http://minresco.com/meteor/meteor13.htm

A gift for someone with "everything?"

Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: Wirt Atmar [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2007 1:14 PM
To: Hawkins, Jim (HP, MPE/iX Lab); [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] OT was: Replacing Cell phone.... bad company

Jim writes:

> Despite visits to India, Japan, UK, Indonesia, and Thailand, Alice Springs
> was also my one experience actually driving a car on the "other side".  I
> found "around town" and highways to be not very difficult as striping and
> general traffic flows provided enough cues to keep me where belonged.
> Places without a centerline like parking lots were a bit trickier as the
> tendency was to drift right rather than left.   Only really bad "wrong side"
> time was when we were visiting the Henbury Craters (http://www.nt.gov.au/
> nreta/parks/find/henbury.html).   I made a left turn onto a dirt road and
> drove several hundred feet before my father suggested I move over to the left
> in case another car came.  Fun memories!

I too had the same experience when driving in Australia. Driving in the cities
never seemed all that difficult, but once out in the country, you simply had the
irresistable tendency to drift over onto the right hand side of the road.

One of the most famous scientists of the space age, Eugene Shoemaker, was killed
near Alice Springs. Although it was never explicitly stated that he too had
drifted over onto the wrong side of the road, that was certainly the
implication:

==============================================

July 18, 1997

Forwarded from Brian Marsden
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

EUGENE M. SHOEMAKER (1928-1997)

Gene Shoemaker, renowned both as a geologist and an astronomer, and a member of
the Board of Directors of The Spaceguard Foundation, was killed instantly on the
afternoon of July 18, when his car collided head-on with another vehicle on an
unpaved road in the Tanami Desert northwest of Alice Springs, in the Northern
Territory of Australia. His wife Carolyn, who had closely collaborated with him
in both his geological and his astronomical activities for many years, was
injured in the accident and is in stable condition in Alice Springs Hospital.

==============================================

Shoemaker essentially single-handedly proved that the vast majority of the
craters on the Moon were the results of impacts and not vuclanism. At the
beginning of the Apollo program, he had had great hopes of being the first
scientist on the Moon but was deselected due to health problems. Since then
though, in honor of his long string of accomplishments, his ashes have been
transported to the Moon, and he rests there now.

The bottom line: be careful driving in Alice Springs if you're an American.

Wirt Atmar

AICS Research, Inc
University Park, NM 88003-4691 USA
(575) 524-9800
(575) 526-4700 fax
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