Join us on January 3rd for our next Full Moon-th On-line Meetup!

Our guest will be Br. Bob Macke, SJ, – curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory, and member of the mission teams for the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission, and the Lucy mission to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids.

Our tradition of hosting online meetups with our Sacred Space Astronomy members and the Vatican Observatory staff, scholars and friends during the Full Moon in Tucson (or thereabout) continues on Saturday January 3, 2026 at 10:00 AM Tucson time, 12:00 Noon ET or 17:00 UTC.

This meetup is a perk for our Sacred Space Astronomy subscribers- you get to chat with each other, and astronomers and scientists from the Vatican Observatory!

We’ll also discuss the latest astronomy news and an update about the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope.

Br. Macke’s skills at meteorite analysis has led him to positions on the mission teams for not one, but two asteroid missions: the Lucy mission to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, and OSIRIS-REx, where he designed a custom Ideal-Gas Pycnometer to study asteroid samples.

Br. Bob was our guest back in December of 2023 – just a few short months after the OSIRIS-REx mission returned its sample of asteroid Bennu to Earth. Now, two years later, some very interesting research has come from those samples!

This is the third time that Brother Bob will be joining us. His topic this month will be the current status of the NASA missions he’s working on… and an “inside baseball” look at how NASA missions are proposed, selected, developed, and executed.