The NISAR Mission: Overview and Insights After 10 Months in Space

Webinar Speaker:

Marco Lavalle

Affiliation:

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, USA

  • 7 July 2026
  • 6:00 PM UTC
  • Sponsored by IEEE GRSS
  • TC Webinar - IFT
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About the Webinar

The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission was launched on July 30, 2025, completed commissioning in late 2025, and began science operations at the beginning of January 2026. The mission is currently in its calibration and validation phase, which is slated for completion by the end of June 2026. As the first mission designed to provide systematic, global, dual-frequency L- and S-band SAR observations, NISAR is opening a new era for monitoring Earth’s land, ice, and ecosystems. The mission observes nearly all land and ice-covered surfaces on both ascending and descending passes every 12 days at L-band, with coordinated S-band acquisitions over India and surrounding regions, Antarctica, and selected global areas.

This webinar will provide an overview of the NISAR mission, including its science objectives, observation strategy, acquisition modes, and Level-1 through Level-3 product suite. It will also present early insights from the first 10 months in space, including spacecraft and instrument performance, calibration and validation progress, and the characteristics of early science products, which will be free and open. With approximately 20 global 12-day cycles of data available, the presentation will highlight the emerging capability of NISAR dense time series, coupled with global mapping, for science and applications.

Science examples will be shown across the major NISAR disciplines, including solid Earth deformation, cryosphere dynamics, ecosystems, soil moisture, hydrology, and disaster response. The webinar will also discuss key technical and operational challenges encountered in the early mission phase, including large-scale processing, radio-frequency interference suppression, and mitigation of ionospheric effects in L-band SAR data.

 

About the Speaker

Marco Lavalle is the Deputy Project Scientist for the NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) Mission and a Group Supervisor at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology (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 permanent 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. He is currently Group Supervisor for the SAR Algorithms and Processing Group at JPL. 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.

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