Notable Black Innovators: Moriba K. Jah, PhD.
Moriba Kemessia Jah is a distinguished African American space scientist and aerospace engineer.
He was born in San Francisco, California in 1971, to a mother from Haiti and father from Sierra Leone.
He moved to Venezuela at the age of six. He later returned to the United States and enlisted in the Air Force.
Jah began his academic journey by earning a bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University in 1999.
He next attended the University of Colorado Boulder, earning a master’s degree in 2001 and a PhD in Aerospace Engineering Sciences in 2005.
His doctoral research focused on using the Unscented Kalman Filter to automate aerobraking operations for spacecraft.
During his PhD, Jah worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as a navigation engineer. Here, he honed his skills in developing navigation algorithms and performing orbit determination for several Mars missions, including the Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, and Mars Exploration Rover.
In 2006, he transitioned to Oceanit Laboratories in Maui as a Senior Scientist, where he utilized optical data to determine space trajectories. His work earned him the NASA Space Act Award in 2007 for his contributions to space navigation.
In 2007, he joined the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) where he directed the Advanced Sciences and Technology Research Institute for Astronautics (ASTRIA) in Maui and later at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.
At AFRL, he led initiatives in Space Situational Awareness and advised on satellite guidance and control.
In 2016, Jah became an associate professor at the University of Arizona before joining the University of Texas at Austin in 2017.
His research has focused on non-gravitational astrodynamics and leveraging big data to track and understand space debris.
He has been instrumental in developing models to quantify the space object population, addressing the challenge of tracking over 23,000 human-made objects in Earth’s orbit.
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