Dr. Pearce has over 25 years’ experience and many different aspects of the space surveillance/space control mission area.  His 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, Eric 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.    Dr. Pearce’s current research interests include the application of astronomical telescope and advanced instrumentation to space surveillance—especially extremely high speed multi-color photometry, and the study of the dynamics and characteristics of high area-to-mass ratio objects in the earth orbiting environment.   Dr. Pearce has three adult sons, Christopher, Benjamin, and Jack who reside in New England and wife Cathy in Tucson.