Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ is Director of the the Vatican Observatory and President of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. A native of Detroit, Michigan, he earned undergraduate and masters’ degrees from MIT, and a Ph. D. in Planetary Science from the University of Arizona; he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard and MIT, served in the US Peace Corps (Kenya), and taught university physics at Lafayette College before entering the Jesuits in 1989.

Along with more than 200 scientific publications, he is the author of a number of popular books including Turn Left at Orion (with Dan Davis), and most recently Would You Baptize an Extraterrestial? (with Father Paul Mueller, SJ).

[Read more about Br. Guy]

Dan Davis is a professor of geophysics at Stony Brook University. His primary area of research specialization is the tectonics of regions where plates converge, causing great earthquakes and the construction of mountain belts. Other areas of research include the application of geophysics to nuclear arms control and to the study of glacial and post-glacial geology.

Dan is a lifelong stargazer, and although during the daytime his attention is focused downward towards the Earth, that changes after dark.

David H. Levy is one of the most successful comet discoverers in history. He has discovered 22 comets, nine of them using his own backyard telescopes. With Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker at the Palomar Observatory in California he discovered Shoemaker-Levy 9, the comet that collided with Jupiter in 1994. That episode produced the most spectacular explosions ever witnessed in the solar system. Levy is currently involved with the Jarnac Comet Survey, which is based at the Jarnac Observatory in Vail, Arizona but which has telescopes planned for locations around the world.

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Dolores Hill, a former resident of Michigan, is a meteorite specialist at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Lab, is now also a public outreach specialist with NASA’s OSIRIS Rex mission to asteroid Bennu operated by LPL. The goal of OSIRIS-REx is to collect a sample of Bennu in mid-2020, and return it to Earth in late 2023. Bennu turned out to be rockier than anticipated, but mission planners have now identified four sites on its surface that are smooth enough for OSIRIS-REx to collect a sample. Dolores will fill us in on the latest news about the sites chosen to be sampled, and what we’ve learned so far about this fascinating little neighbor of ours in space.

[Read more about Dolores Hill]