ATLAS Co-PI and senior software engineer Larry Denneau was the chief software architect of the Pan-STARRS moving object processing system (MOPS) and adapted it to ATLAS. MOPS is a software package that automatically identifies solar system objects (in particular hazardous asteroids) in the ATLAS and Pan-STARRS data streams.

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.