PhD position RSO TraFFIC - AI and Space Domain Astronomy

Doctorat / PhD Type de contrat : TEMPORARY Date limite de candidature : 2026-12-20T00:00:00+01:00

The University of Groningen (UG) partners in the national project Resident Space Object Tracking For Fusion, Inference, and Characterisation (RSO TraFFIC). It aims to improve the tracking and characterisation of objects in Earth orbit. The Groningen contribution is led by Dr Gijs Verdoes Kleijn of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute and Dr Eduardo Balbinot (Center for Information Technology and Kapteyn Astronomical Institute). The 2.6 Meur 6 year project brings together the universities of Delft, Groningen, Leiden and Radboud, the Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre (NLR) and the space companies Dunedain and Ecosmic. Modern society depends on space-based infrastructure, but Earth’s orbit is becoming increasingly crowded: about 40,000 objects are catalogued, two-thirds of all spacecraft ever launched have gone up in the past seven years, and more than a million untrackable fragments between one and ten centimetres—each large enough to destroy a satellite—are in orbit. This makes it more difficult to monitor what is happening in space and to prevent collisions. The RSO TraFFIC project will address these challenges by combining data from different sensors and developing new sensing techniques and algorithms to track objects and examine the legal and governance frameworks needed to manage Earth orbit as a shared resource in a safe, sustainable and responsible way. What are you going to do? The Groningen team leads the project’s work on data management and AI-based analysis. You will do PhD research into adapting astronomical AI foundation models to recognise asteroids, comets and satellite trails in telescope images and extract signals from rapid brightness measurements. These capabilities will be built into General Open Orbital Dynamics platform, an open-science platform developed jointly by Delft University of Technology and the University of Groningen (Dirkx et al 2026). This platform will serve as the project’s central data and analysis hub and is hosted at the university’s OmegaCEN Astronomical Science Data Center using the UG's Center for Information Technology research data-handling facilities. The PhD project is planned to start around January 2028.