The Hub Talks: The NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) Mission: Overview and Status

Speaker: Dr Marco Lavalle is the Deputy Project Scientist for the NISAR Mission and the Group Supervisor (JPL equivalent for ESA’s Section Manager) of the SAR Algorithms and Processing Group at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, California). He received an M.Sc. in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Rome Tor Vergata (Rome, Italy) in 2006 and a Ph.D. from the University of Rennes 1 (Rennes, France) and the University of Rome Tor Vergata in December 2009. From 2006 to 2008, he was a Visiting Scientist at the European Space Agency (ESRIN), supporting ESA’s activities on polarimetric radar calibration and interferometric algorithm development. From January 2010 to December 2011, he was a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at JPL. He became a Staff Scientist in the Radar Science and Engineering Section at JPL in January 2012. Dr. Lavalle has served as Principal Investigator and co-Investigator for several NASA programs. He has been leading the NASA Distributed Aperture Radar Tomographic Sensors (DARTS) project and is a member of the ESA ROSE-L Mission Advisory Group. His research interests include retrieval algorithm development using interferometric and polarimetric radar techniques, physical and statistical model formulation, electromagnetic propagation, scattering theory, SAR tomography, ecosystem modeling, and surface parameters estimation. Dr. Lavalle is the recipient of the 2019 NASA Early Career Public Achievement Medal and the 2020 JPL Lew Allen Award for Excellence.

Abstract: The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) Mission launched successfully on July 30, 2025, and will begin distributing science data as early as mid-October 2025, ramping up to full science operations – collecting all land and ice-covered surfaces every 12 days from ascending and descending orbit vantage points – in early November 2025. These data will be freely and openly distributed from the NASA Alaska Satellite Facility within days of acquisition. NISAR observations are capable of addressing fundamental and applied research topics spanning disciplines that include ecosystems science, cryosphere science, geodesy, solid earth science, hydrology, disaster response, and resource management. This talk will provide an overview of the mission, including its science and technology innovation, and dive into its status with emphasis on data and uniqueness of this first-of-its-kind L and S band mission.