On this episode on the Cold Star Project, hosted by Jason Kanigan, our guest is Dr. Moriba Jah. Dr. Jah had an amazing career as navigator of a number of NASA Mars missions, and is now Director, Computational Astronautical Sciences & Technologies, Oden Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.
I was referred to Dr. Jah by Fred Kennedy, past director of the US Space Development Agency, as a person “leading the charge” on space traffic management.
Show Notes
In our interview, we cover:
- the reason current collision detection equations are so lousy, and what we can do to improve them
- how photoacoustic sensing can be improved and used to develop Resident Space Object (RSO) signatures
- what we need to learn before machine learning/AI can be used to identify threatening behaviors or as a forensic tool after anomalous events
- what credibility metrics are for collision prevention, what’s missing, and why we need these
- how Bayesian equations can be used to improve our space tracking data, orbital collision detection models and certainty
- what curved space is, and what is challenging about modeling RSO travel within it
- what we can investigate and build so we have a tool to estimate debris fields upon reentry–no models of which exist now.
Dr. Moriba Jah’s article on Wikipedia
Orekit database by CS Group (creator of which will be a guest on an upcoming episode)
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