Dr. Pearce’s primary area of research has been the development of advanced systems and astronomical techniques specifically optimized for the challenges of discovering, tracking and characterizing artificial earth orbiting satellites.  He began his career at New Mexico Tech developing one of the first completely robotic systems to search for and detect extragalactic supernovae.  Afterwards, he completed a post-doc appointment at the University of Chicago Yerkes Observatory developing software for the Apache Point 3.5 m telescope.  Most of his professional career has been spent at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, applying these skills to developing systems for detecting and characterizing manmade earth satellites for the Air Force and DARPA.  During this time, he led the successful development of the 3.5 m DARPA Space Surveillance Telescope (SST), the world’s first large Mersenne-Schmidt telescope.   The SST was specifically designed to meet the emerging challenges of high sensitivity synoptic surveillance of the near-geosynchronous orbit environment.