2025 January 9
It’s a new year, and hot on the heels of some other good news, here’s another development: last week I started as the new Technical Lead of the IAU Minor Planet Center! The MPC is based at the CfA, so I’m not going anywhere physically, but nonetheless this is a big, exciting step for me.
If you’re not familiar with the MPC, its About page offers a good summary:
The Minor Planet Center (MPC) is the single worldwide location for receipt and distribution of positional measurements of minor planets, comets and outer irregular natural satellites of the major planets. The MPC is responsible for the identification, designation and orbit computation for all of these objects. This involves maintaining the master files of observations and orbits, keeping track of the discoverer of each object, and announcing discoveries to the rest of the world via electronic circulars and an extensive website. The MPC operates at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, under the auspices of Division F of the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
While MPC’s activities cover a fairly wide range of minor-planet topics, its funding all comes from NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office — the American portion of the worldwide project to try to ensure that human civilization isn’t destroyed by an asteroid (!). As the world’s clearinghouse for asteroid discoveries and orbital information, MPC is not exactly the early-warning system for dangerous asteroids — JPL is responsible for that — but it is the authoritative source and steward of the data that underpin that early-warning system. It’s exceedingly unlikely that MPC will ever affect your day-to-day life, but there’s a slim possibility that it might literally save the world.
While I don't have any background in minor-planet science, there’s a lot about MPC that feels very familiar to me. It’s a great example of a phenomenon that you see all over science: you organize a small research team to gather astrometric measurements so that you can calculate orbits, turn around, and … a few decades later, you realize that every single thing that you could possibly want to accomplish depends on coaxing results out of a team of software developers that you probably didn’t even notice hiring. For many scientists this is a very distressing realization!
My perspective is: capital-S Science doesn’t care whether you have any interest in managing a team of software engineers or not. If you want lead even a modestly-sized research project in the 21st century, you’re going to have to do it. And if you want to succeed, or if you simply want to not be miserable, you’re going to have to do it well. In a very real sense, projects like the MPC are made out of software — the way in which someone working at MPC spends their days is shaped at every level by the design of the software systems surrounding them.
I view my new job as fundamentally about making sure that at the MPC, people are in control of technology, and not the other way around. This will be a never-ending challenge: MPC is a busy, operational system, so you can’t just shut things down for a week to fix something up; and the MPC data are sufficiently voluminous and complex that there will always be interesting things that you might like to do that would require major engineering investments to actually accomplish. That’s a big thing that excites me about this new role: if things are going right, MPC will be a place where science and technology drive each other forward. That’s where the best opportunities in research are always found, I think; hopefully MPC’s accomplishments will prove me resoundingly right.
Somewhat less grandiosely, there are some tangible tasks for the near future. Rubin Observatory will start coming online in just a few months, and it promises to increase the amount of data flowing into MPC every night by a factor of ten. It is absolutely essential that MPC is prepared to handle this. Based on a lot of work done before my arrival, the team is confident that the system will be ready, but until further notice my top priority is to make sure that we’re preposterously ready.
I have a lot of ideas about where things might go once we’re over that hump, but in a certain sense it’s nice to be staring down the barrel of Rubin, since it provides a strong focus while I get up to speed on all of the science, systems, and history of the MPC — which is nearing its eightieth anniversary, after all. By the time that it makes sense to even contemplate pitching significant new projects, I’ll still just be a novice in the ways of the MPC, but I’ll know a hell of a lot more than I do right now.
I can’t help but mention that this new position represents a big step forward for me personally, as well. While this job isn’t formally permanent or permanent-track, it is the first time in my career that I’ve had an open-ended appointment. This is happening because, after a dozen years as a Harvard employee, I’ve made the leap and am now working for the Smithsonian Institution. As an SAO Astrophysicist, I also gain PI rights, the ability to supervise students and staff, and a formalized means to buy out my own time to work on whatever projects I can get funding for — all novelties for me, more than a decade after getting my PhD. In recent years, especially, I’ve come to appreciate how the lack of these kinds of privileges really constrains your career as a researcher, and my morale is through the roof as I think about all of the new options before me.
I’m also very much looking forward to not being forced to renew my appointment every few years. You can make it work — it’s what I’ve been doing since I got to Harvard — but it sucks. Maybe it depends on your personality, but I felt like I could never bring myself to plan anything with a time horizon extending beyond my next drop-dead date. Why pursue some slow-developing vision when you’re going to need to convince someone to hire you next year?
There’s a straightforward answer to this, of course: the people who could hire you might be impressed by that vision! For better or for worse, my experience on the faculty job market did not convince me that this was going to work very well, at least not for me. I won’t rewrite history: I really, really wanted to become a professor. Over a span of five years as a postdoc, I applied to 69 faculty jobs (nice) and was rejected 69 times (not nice). As you might imagine, I tell myself a variety of stories about why that came to pass, and some of them even involve the possibility of some personal shortcomings. But at a certain point, the “why” isn’t so important; it’s an empirical fact that people weren’t buying what I was selling. To be honest, you’ll never convince me that I wouldn’t have been pretty good at the job — but in the end my path has gone in a different direction, and I’d like to think that I’m comfortable with that. Certainly, while there have been frustrations over the years, I have absolutely nothing to complain about.
That being said: Harvard truly needs to figure something out about how it treats its non-tenure-track researchers. If you actually read the detailed university policies for the NTT research appointments, two things become clear: no matter how senior you are, you’re essentially still some faculty member’s gofer; and the university doesn’t really want you there. My favorite example of this is that the promotion process from Research Fellow to Research Scientist requires a letter stating “why it is important for the candidate to remain at Harvard rather than pursue an independent career.” Even the Senior Research Scientist position is term-limited to five years; “reappointment may be possible.” You can progress through these roles for 20+ years but if the wrong faculty member retires or gets hit by a bus, you’re out the door.
I suppose this could be fine, with sufficient honesty and clarity, except that this faculty-heliocentric approach is a really terrible fit for what it takes to do modern science. Cutting-edge astronomy projects need strong collaborations between not just astrophysicists, but also people like statisticians, engineers, or — ahem — really good software developers. So you get a situation where faculty are driven to pull a variety of skilled professionals into their projects, but the university simply has no way to offer them a genuinely sustainable, rewarding career path. Not only is this bad for many of the people involved, it’s bad for the science as well! I’m convinced that many science departments would benefit hugely from having even a single skilled, empowered software developer on staff — but, well, that’s not gonna happen at Harvard anytime soon. In fact, Harvard being Harvard, you can assume that it’ll be among the last places to modernize its approach. I suppose you can also expect to see more arrangements like the CfA — where the university’s shortsightedness is buffered by SAO’s ability to sustain a pool of collaborating professionals.
Anyway, the point is: not my problem anymore! I can’t predict the future any better than anyone else, but I’m finally thinking about my career in terms of decades, not just years. I’m thrilled to come aboard the MPC and am already feeling more and more confident that I can do a lot to help the whole team succeed over the years to come.
Oh, also, I released DASCH DR7 after two years of work. More on that soon. In a fun bit of luck, my new MPC office used to belong to none other than Annie Jump Cannon, the first curator of the photographic plates whose legacy DASCH seeks to honor.