That same year (1965) he joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and the
radio astronomy group of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. He remained on the faculty at MIT for the rest of his life. He also served as an assistant director of
MIT Lincoln Laboratory from 1990 to 2001. From 2003 to 2005, he was a member of the U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. for detection of periodic signals, which enabled him and Edward C. Reifenstein III to find two
pulsars in the vicinity of the
Crab Nebula, which were close enough to it (given the
angular resolution of the antenna) to potentially be associated with it. One of these, NP 0532, was subsequently determined to be at the center of the nebula. The first astronomical pulsar had been discovered by
Jocelyn Bell Burnell and
Antony Hewish in 1967, but the origin of such pulsating radio signals had not yet been established. The association of a pulsar with the Crab Nebula, which was known to be the remnant of a
supernova, supported the hypothesis that pulsars are rotating
neutron stars, and provided observational evidence that a neutron star could result from a supernova explosion. He proposed two
microwave spectrometers for
remote-sensing of the Earth, which were flown on the
Nimbus 5 and
Nimbus 6 satellites, respectively. These experimental instruments could measure
atmospheric temperature profiles even in the presence of clouds that blocked the view of
infrared instruments, and they were forerunners of subsequent microwave
atmospheric sounding instruments (
MSU,
AMSU,
ATMS) on
NOAA and
EUMETSAT weather satellites. In 1968 Staelin and Norman E. Gaut founded Environmental Research and Technology, Inc. (acquired by
AECOM in 1979), a company which specialized in air-quality measurements and became "one of the largest air quality monitoring sources in the world". He was a co-investigator for the Planetary Radio Astronomy instrument on the
Voyager 1 and
Voyager 2 missions to
Jupiter,
Saturn,
Uranus and
Neptune, and a member of the science team for the
Atmospheric Infrared Sounder on NASA's
Aqua satellite. == Personal life ==