• Unapologetic member of the Reality-Based Community
• Astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO).
• Research on chaos in celestial mechanics and the dynamics of Solar System objects. See my publications, dynamics, and projects pages. Also abstracts on the invaluable ADS Abstract Server.
• Improving ephemerides of Solar System bodies, which includes working with PEP, the Planetary Ephemeris Program, and (mostly) on Newcomb, a new ephemeris program being designed and written by me and James Hilton, another USNO astronomer.
• Formerly with the FAME project, a collaborative effort between the USNO, the Naval Research Lab (NRL), the Lockheed-Martin (LMCO) Advanced Technology Center (ATC), and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) to build and fly an astrometric satellite that would measure stellar positions to better than 50 microarcseconds (an average strand of human hair would subtend this angle if you were viewing it from a distance of 200 miles). Here are a few FAME science highlights. For more FAME science, visit the FAME site's science page.

  January, 2002: FAME has been cancelled by NASA, due mainly to outrageous cost overruns combined with technical mediocrity at Lockheed, to the total inability of SITe to produce our CCDs (zero working CCDs out of 20 runs totalling 400 chips), and to NASA politics combined with unfortunate NASA budgetary woes (including having to cover the cost overruns of each of the other three current MIDEX missions). Nobody outside of SITe knows why the foundry runs were complete failures.

Wondering where that icon in the upper left corner comes from? It is a 3D representation of an energy surface in the circular restricted three-body problem. Here is a larger version. The curves at the bottom are a contour plot of the 3D surface projected onto the xy plane. The contour curves are the same as the ones that appear on the surface image. The HTML pages of the corresponding Maple document that generated the image can be found here.

What I did last month (for the truly bored).

My résumé is here.

Sigh.