Moriba Jah, American Aerospace Engineer, and Space Environmentalist completed his Masters and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Colorado in 2001 and 2005, respectively. He is best known for his work with designing navigation software and creating trajectory plans through NASA, his contributions to a variety of Mars missions including Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, Mars Exploration Rovers, MUSES-C and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, as well as his research and dedication to tracking of objects and debris in space. One of his greatest influences and mentors while attending at the University of Colorado is George Born, a former employee at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California as well as a founder of the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research (CCAR) through funding and support from the University of Colorado Boulder. I had the pleasure of conducting a phone interview with Dr. Jah through which I was able to gain insight into his work at NASA as well as his time here at the University of Colorado, and how the University helped set him up for the career he has today; the transcript of the interview is provided below and has been edited for user readability.
You have an abundance of accomplishments ranging from your work on space traffic monitoring to the development of algorithms and orbit determination for five Mars Missions, but what in your career would you say you are most proud of?
I think it’s my latest work on space environmentalism, basically having created, with my students and other colleagues, this graph database, AstriaGraph, that brings in different sources of information about things in space and basically lets you visualize that in one place, I think that’s the thing I’m most proud of.
And so, did you know from a young age that you wanted to work in Aerodynamics and do all the things that you do today?
No, so I was enlisted in the US Air Force, I was a Security Policeman and my job was guarding Nuclear missiles in Montana. And I did that for all four of my years as an enlisted person and during that time, one of my colleagues had mentioned that if I ever got out of the service, I should consider pursuing an education in Aerospace Engineering, and after guarding these things how it would be cool to see how they work and why they work. And so when I got out of the service, just based on that I just went ‘let me try studying this Aerospace Engineering thing’ and I just never in a million years imagined that I would be participating in interplanetary missions, sending like five missions to Mars, and all this other stuff.
Can you tell me a little bit about your educational background?
Yeah, so I studied Aerospace Engineering for my Bachelor’s at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona and my mentor at Embry Riddle, Ron Madler, who the current Dean at the College of Engineering, did all of his Aerospace Engineering education at CU Boulder. He definitely inspired me to go on and get a Masters and a Ph.D. and seeing how well he really understood the subject material, and how he spoke highly of the program at CU, I ended up going to CU Boulder for my Masters and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering.
Would you say that completing your postgraduate career at CU opened any doors for you or helped you establish yourself in the industry in any way?
Yeah absolutely, I mean I’ll put it this way, one of the things that I really wanted to do was to be an Astrodynamicist, so Astrodynamics is the science that studies motion of objects in space and I knew from my time at Embry-Riddle with Ron Madler that I wanted to be an Astrodynamicist and my dream job was to be able to do that for interplanetary missions at NASA. This really meant working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and NASA Jet Propulsion Lab has an open house once a year around May time-frame where anybody can go to JPL and get a tour of all the facilities. So, I did that and I started kind of interviewing people and trying to find ‘who are the people who do Astrodynamics at JPL and I found a few and by in large, when I asked them where they went to school they usually gave me one of three answers, either Purdue, the University of Texas at Austin, or University of Colorado Boulder. And so with those being the top three schools that most of these people had gone to and then it was a no-brainer for me and so absolutely, the fact that I went and got my degree at CU Boulder was pretty much a direct-entry path into a job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
And now you’re working as an associate professor at The University of Texas at Austin, so how exactly did you find yourself there?
Yeah so, interestingly enough, I admittedly was not a 4.0 student by any stretch of the imagination, I was more of a B kind of student, and not a great test-taker either. So when I came out of Embry-Riddle, I had a 3.2 GPA which was kind of on the low-end to be considered for Grad school and when I took my GRE’s, I didn’t score very well but, at Embry-Riddle I had the opportunity to do research with NASA through something called the NASA Space Grant, which most States are part of that consortium for NASA Space Grant. And so, because I had done research and published some of my work in conferences, George Born at the University of Colorado Boulder had known about my work and I guess he was impressed by it and so he was the one that really helped me get into the program at CU. Unfortunately, he passed about two years ago, but I was his 30th Ph.D. student and I love him like a brother and owe so much of my career to him. So seeing as George’s roots all traced back to UT it just made so much sense in my career to continue his legacy. CCAR already exists and my stuff is really focused on space traffic and orbital debris and I said ‘let me see if UT will have me and I can just develop a world-class research program there in honor of George’, and now I’m here. He brought me under his wing and thanks to him kind of giving me a chance, I have the career that I have.
As a Space Environmentalist, one of Dr. Jah’s main focuses is in the ongoing space debris problem and making “space a place that is safe to operate, that is free and useful for future generations.”
Check out his website, AstriaGraph, the first RDF-based Knowledge Graph for Space Traffic Monitoring, and play around with the different sources and regions to view all the various objects that are polluting space:
In addition to his efforts with space debris and space traffic research, Dr. Jah also expressed importance in the promotion of women in STEM and extended an offer to women looking to pursue a Postgraduate education relating to his field and be able to work under him at UT Austin’s school for Aerospace Engineering.
Thank you again to Dr. Jah, none of this would’ve been possible without his help and cooperation.