Seattle, Washington, USA · He/Him 47.6062° N, 122.3321° W
Joachim Moeyens
Astronomer and software engineer working on asteroid discovery.
Seattle, Washington, USA · He/Him 47.6062° N, 122.3321° W
Astronomer and software engineer working on asteroid discovery.
About
I build software that finds asteroids. For my doctorate, I developed Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery (THOR) with Professor Mario Jurić. THOR was designed to find asteroids in optical survey data not originally intended for asteroid discovery. Now, through the generous support of the Asteroid Institute, my main focus is extending THOR to find near-Earth objects and those that might one day impact Earth.
Work on THOR has been featured in the New York Times and Wired. For my dissertation, I was awarded a Ph.D. Prize by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 2023.
Affiliations
A program of the B612 Foundation.
Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics & Cosmology.
Department of Astronomy.
Research
A cadence-independent algorithm for linking single detections across nights into orbits, enabling discovery in archival and non-traditional survey data.
Cloud-hosted astrodynamics platform for running discovery, precovery, and impact probability pipelines at scale. Built by Asteroid Institute, a program of B612 Foundation.
Open-source thermal modeling for NEOWISE and similar infrared observations, used for size and albedo retrieval.
Validating and testing the Observatory's Solar System Pipelines as part of commissioning.
Building research-grade software with frontier AI models. Extending THOR to the near-Earth object population and preparing it for discovery on Vera C. Rubin Observatory data. On the side, dreaming of differentiable astrodynamics.
Software
thor LeadTracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery — discovers asteroids by linking single detections across nights, without pre-built tracklets.
adam_core CoreCore astrodynamics primitives shared across the ADAM platform: orbits, ephemerides, coordinate frames and transforms.
difi LeadEvaluates the findability of simulated small-body populations under a given survey cadence and discovery algorithm.
Publications
Full list on ADS · ORCID · Google Scholar
Talks, Presentations & Posters
Awards & Fellowships
Experience
DiRAC Institute, University of Washington
Joint Research Scientist appointment at the Asteroid Institute (B612 Foundation). Developing THOR and the ADAM platform.
2023 – present
Department of Astronomy, University of Washington
Research-focused graduate studies yielding THOR and ATM. Led discussion, quiz, and lab sections for ~60 students across three academic quarters.
2016 – 2022
University of Washington
Analyzed LSST's Moving Object Pipeline System (MOPS) performance for NEO detection with Prof. Mario Jurić and Dr. Lynne Jones.
2015 – 2016
University of Washington
Constrained atmospheric extinction using stellar magnitudes with Prof. Željko Ivezić.
2014 – 2015
Education
University of Washington · Certificate in Advanced Data Science
Thesis: The Characterization and Discovery of Solar System Small Bodies in Modern Astronomical Surveys
2018 – 2022
University of Washington
2016 – 2018
University of Washington · with Honors
2010 – 2015
Contact