He worked on various missions while at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as well as navigation support for the Apollo program in the late 1960s while at Johnson Space Center.
After working for Ling-Temco-Vought Corporation in Dallas, he returned to University of Texas where he completed his doctorate in aerospace engineering in 1968 under the guidance of professor Byron Tapley, with whom he would later write a book on satellite navigation and orbit determination.
At JPL he worked on the Mariner 9 project as part of the Celestial Mechanics Team and contributed to the gravity field estimation of Mars and overall navigation efforts of the first spacecraft to ever orbit another planet.
The results of the Phobos Experiment Team, led by Robert Tolson of the Langley Research Center, were published in Science, 6 January 1978, vol 199.
This spacecraft flew the first suite of ocean-observing microwave sensors and required orbit determination solution uncertainties below 1 meter in satellite position.
The spacecraft failed three months after launch but had returned a huge amount of data on global ocean winds, waves, currents and surface temperature.
This joint project between NASA and the French space agency CNES required the most precise orbit determination solutions to date and provided centimeter-level uncertainty in sea level measurements.
TOPEX/Poseidon changed our understanding of the oceans and graphically depicted El Niño and La Niña as well as giving us data which allowed mapping of the global currents and circulation patterns for the first time.
Walter Munk, one of the world’s foremost oceanographers, would call this mission “the most successful ocean experiment of all time.”[4] Born would also be involved in the development of the Jason-1 and Jason-2 spacecraft, the successors to TOPEX/Poseidon.
Its research program emphasizes astrodynamics, space mission design and satellite navigation, GPS technology development and applications, meteorology, oceanography, geodesy, and terrestrial vegetation studies with in situ and remote sensing data.
He served as guest editor for numerous special journal issues devoted to scientific and engineering results from the many missions he worked on, including TOPEX/Poseidon, Seasat and Jason-1.