1. Moriba Kemessia Jah CorrFRSE was born on 1971 and is an American space scientist and aerospace engineer who describes himself as a "space environmentalist".
31 Facts About Moriba Jah
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Moriba Jah specializes in orbit determination and prediction, especially as related to space situational awareness and space traffic monitoring.
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Moriba Jah is currently a full professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, a position he attained in 2024, and a National Geographic Explorer.
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Moriba Jah has authored a number of academic papers, including Entropy-based approach for uncertainty propagation of nonlinear dynamical systems.
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Moriba Jah previously worked as a spacecraft navigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he was involved in navigation for the Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, Mars Exploration Rover, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
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Moriba Jah is a Fellow of the American Astronautical Society, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety, and the Royal Astronomical Society.
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Moriba Jah was selected for the 10th anniversary class of TED Fellows and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2022.
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Moriba Jah was selected for the AIAA class of Fellows and Honorary Fellows in the year of the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11.
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Moriba Jah's work has been featured in Nature, Popular Science, and National Geographic.
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Moriba Jah was born in San Francisco, California to Elsie Turnier from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti and Abraham Moriba Jah from Pujehun, Sierra Leone.
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Moriba Jah was inspired to become an astrodynamicist by Ron Madler.
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Moriba Jah later spent a year at the Los Alamos National Laboratory working on space mission design.
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Moriba Jah then spent two years at Microcosm, performing the orbital analysis for several satellite constellations.
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Moriba Jah went to the University of Colorado Boulder for his graduate studies, earning a master's in 2001 and PhD, under the supervision of George Born, in 2005.
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In 2006, Moriba Jah left NASA JPL and became a Senior Scientist at Oceanit Laboratories on Maui, which involved using optical data to determine space trajectories.
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Moriba Jah was then awarded the NASA Space Act Award for his work on the Inertial Measurements for Aero-assisted Navigation, in 2007.
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In 2007 Moriba Jah joined the Air Force Research Laboratory.
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Moriba Jah directed the AFRL Advanced Sciences and Technology Research Institute for Astronautics in Maui from 2007 to 2010 and then at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico until 2014.
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At Kirtland Air Force Base, Moriba Jah was mission lead in Space Situational Awareness and advised the satellite guidance and control program.
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Moriba Jah left in 2016 to become an associate professor at the University of Arizona.
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Moriba Jah served as director of the University of Arizona's Space Object Behavioral Sciences initiative.
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In 2017, Moriba Jah joined the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Moriba Jah has stated that the United States Strategic Command cannot accurately track all satellites, and their current data could be biased, noisy and corrupt.
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Moriba Jah gave formal congressional testimony to the Federal government of the United States in 2017, discussing a Civil Space Traffic Management system.
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Moriba Jah stated that he believes that the USSC should create a global, accessible, and transparent space traffic management system, which would protect spacecraft from debris and a lack of monitoring.
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Moriba Jah has served as a member of the delegation at the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and chairs the NATO SCI-279-TG activity on Space Domain Awareness.
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Moriba Jah was appointed as Core Faculty to the University of Texas at Austin Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences in 2018 where he directs the Computational Astronautical Sciences and Technologies group.
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Moriba Jah has discussed astrodynamics and space policy on NPR, The BBC and National Geographic.
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At The University of Texas at Austin, Jah is a Distinguished Scholar with the Robert S Strauss Center for International Security and Law.
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Moriba Jah's published works include the areas of space situational awareness, space traffic management, spacecraft navigation, space surveillance and tracking, multi-source information fusion, and intersection with space security and safety.
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In 2021, Moriba Jah co-founded Privateer Space with Steve Wozniak and Alex Fielding, where he serves as Chief Scientist.