ATLAS Co-PI and senior software engineer Larry Denneau joined the IfA as the chief software architect of the Pan-STARRS moving object processing system (MOPS) in 2004. MOPS is a software package that automatically identifies solar system objects from survey data. In 2013 Larry joined the ATLAS near-Earth asteroid survey as a co-Investigator and adapted MOPS to the ATLAS Project. ATLAS has discovered over 1400 NEAs to date, including several very notable objects: instellar comet 3I/ATLAS, hazardous asteroid 2024 YR4, naked-eye comets Tsuchinshan–ATLAS (C/2023 A3) and ATLAS (C/2024 G3), and impacting asteroid 2019 MO.

Larry has been poking at computer keyboards since the early 80s and received his B.S.E.E. from the University of Arizona, whereupon he quickly escaped academia. His software career has spanned projects ranging from surface metrology for the semiconductor industry, medical scheduling, geophysical instrumentation, and a dot-com Internet startup that actually turned a profit. Now back in academia, Larry received a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Queen’s University Belfast and has enthusiastically joined the effort to protect the earth from dangerous asteroids.