Michael Belton is an astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatories in Tucson, Ariz., specializing in observational and interpretive planetary astronomy and space exploration. He is leader of the Galileo Mission Solid State Imaging (SSI) team and is responsible for the imaging experiments involving Jupiter and the Galilean satellites. His recent research has also focused on developing space mission concepts to obtain information about primitive materials buried at great depths below the surfaces of cometary nuclei. In 1995, Belton was awarded the Gerard P. Kuiper Prize in Planetary Science by the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. Asteroid 3498 also will named for him in recognition of his contributions to solar system astrophysics. He has received numerous NASA awards and was until recently a distinguished visiting scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley.

Joseph A. Burns is professor of astronomy and the Irving Porter Church Professor of Engineering at Cornell University. His current research concerns planetary rings, the small bodies of the solar system (dust, satellites, comets and asteroids), orbital evolution and tides, in addition to the rotational dynamics and strength of satellites, planets and asteroids. Burns is a member of the imaging team for the Cassini (Saturn) and Rosetta missions and an associate of the Galileo imaging team. He held a National Academy of Sciences postdoctoral fellowship at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center from 1967-68 and was a senior investigator from 1975-76 and from 1982-83 at NASA's Ames Research Center. In 1989-95 he sat on the National Research Council's Space Studies Board, the last three years chairing its Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration. In 1994 he received the Masursky Prize of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences. He is a graduate of Cornell.

Maureen Ockert-Bell is a research associate at the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University. She has worked with NASA in spacecraft teams for the past 15 years, including the two Voyager probes, the Mars Observer, Galileo and the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR). Much of the research she is involved in concerns the light-scattering properties of dust and very small particles. This is evident in science papers involving the rings of Uranus and Saturn's F ring, the haze and high clouds of Jupiter and the dust in the Martian atmosphere. Ockert-Bell currently is the sequencing representative for NEAR, creating spacecraft commands that will drive the imager and spectrometer during its encounter with the asteroid 433 Eros in 1999. She is a graduate of the University of Washington, Seattle.

Joseph Veverka

is professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at Cornell University. He is a leader in the exploration by spacecraft of the solar system, having been involved in the Mariner 9 and Viking missions in the 1970s and in the Voyager grand tour of the outer planets, which visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune during the decade from 1979 to 1989. He is currently involved in the Galileo mission to Jupiter, which continues to study the volcanoes of Io and the subsurface ocean of Europa; in the Mars Global Surveyor mission, which is mapping the surface of Mars in unprecedented detail; and in the NEAR, which is on its way to explore asteroid 433 Eros in 1999. He was instrumental in initiating NASA's new Discovery program of small, inexpensive, planetary missions and has been selected by NASA to lead one of these efforts, the Comet Nucleus Tour, to be launched in 2002 for the detailed exploration of three comets. He is a graduate of Harvard.