Meet Jorge Martinez – Early Career Scientist

Jorge Martinez is a Spanish aerospace engineer from northern Spain who completed his bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering in Madrid and later earned a master’s degree in Earth and Space Engineering at TU Delft in the Netherlands. He developed a strong interest in astrodynamics, orbit determination, and planetary science, focusing on studying the motion of spacecraft and celestial bodies to understand their internal structure and evolution. Since December 2023, he has been working at the Royal Observatory of Belgium on the fluid mechanics of Earth’s liquid core and is currently applying for a PhD to return to his main research interests in orbit determination and planetary science.

Jorge Martinez’s work focuses on orbit determination and planetary science. He uses spacecraft data to reconstruct the trajectories of satellites orbiting planets and moons, analyzing the forces acting on them to gain insights into the internal structure, shape, and evolution of these celestial bodies. His research aims to improve the mathematical methods used to process this data, particularly by combining older, lower-quality datasets with newer high-precision measurements and by refining uncertainty estimation, since current models can underestimate errors due to simplifications in physical modeling.