His research into the nature of outer-space materials led to the naming of an asteroid after him in 2000, 4989 Joegoldstein.

During a sabbatical year in 1975, Goldstein discovered that analytical electron microscopy could resolve the solute profiles in synthetic meteoritic materials.

He initiated the Lehigh University Summer Microscopy School in 1970 and these continue today, teaching both SEM and AEM microprobe techniques.

Goldstein was the lead author, in collaboration with several fellow LUSMS faculty members, of four editions of Scanning Electron Microscopy and X-Ray Microanalysis.

In 2005 he received the highest award of the Meteoritical Society, the Leonard Medal, for work on metal, phosphide, carbide, and sulphide in meteorites and lunar rocks; the formation of the Widmanstätten pattern and the determination of cooling rates in irons, stony-irons, and chondrites; the nature of plessite and martensite formation; and determinations of phase diagrams for the Fe-Ni, Fe-Ni-P, Fe-Ni-Co, Fe-Ni-C, and Fe-Ni-S systems[4]