Mike Kelley is an astronomer at the University of Maryland in College Park. He was lucky enough to see comet Halley in the 3rd grade, and hopes to be lucky enough to see it again in 2061. After observing great comets Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake in the 1990's, he set forth for a career in astronomy, and has been studying comets since 2001.
He has observed with many telescopes, including the 200-inch at Palomar Observatory, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and SOFIA, a telescope in a Boeing 747-SP. He is a science team member of the Deep Impact eXtended Investigation (DIXI), which flew a spacecraft right past comet Hartley 2 in 2010, and a member of the Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time Solar System Science Collaboration.
In 2015, he founded the Cometary Science Newsletter as a way to share cometary news for cometary scientists.