Michael James Gaffey (born December 1, 1945) is a planetary scientist who specializes in deriving the mineralogies of asteroids from their reflectance spectra.
[1] He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in geology from the University of Iowa and his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in planetary science graduating in 1974.
From 1974 to 1977, he worked as a Post-doc in the Planetary Astronomy Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
From 1984 to 2001, he taught in the geology department of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
He is currently a professor at the University of North Dakota in the Space Studies department.