“What’s Surfacing About Bennu?” — Brother Guy Consolmagno

The Amateur Observers’ Society of New York welcomes Brother Guy Consolmagno, Director of the Vatican Observatory as our guest lecturer. Br. Guy’s topic for the evening will be “What’s Surfacing About Bennu?”.

The recent NASA mission to asteroid Bennu, OSIRIS-REx, which is bringing back samples gathered on its surface, discovered a surface that, on the surface, doesn’t make sense: it’s covered with boulders, but it absorbs heat like a powder. What’s going on and how did it get that way? Our measurements of the most likely analog meteorite type, CM carbonaceous chondrites, suggests a surprising answer.

Br. Guy, a native of Detroit, Michigan, has earned degrees in Planetary Science from MIT and the University of Arizona. He was a research fellow at Harvard and MIT, served in the US Peace Corps (Kenya), and taught university physics before entering the Jesuits in 1989. At the Vatican Observatory since 1993, in 2015 Pope Francis appointed Dr. Consolmagno director of the Vatican Observatory.