Goutam Chattopadhyay

Abstract:

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which completed eighty-five years of its existence in 2021, builds instruments for NASA missions. Exploring the universe and our own planet Earth from space has been the mission of NASA. Robotics missions such as Voyager, which continues to go beyond our solar system, missions to Mars and other planets, exploring the stars and galaxies for astrophysics missions.
Fundamental science questions drive the selection of NASA missions and innovative instrument development. We design and build instruments to make measurements that can answer those science questions. In this presentation, we will present an overview of the state-of-the-art instruments that we are currently developing and layout the details of the science questions they will try to answer. Rapid progress on multiple fronts, such as commercial software for component and device modeling, low-loss circuits and interconnect technologies, cell phone technologies, and submicron scale lithographic techniques are making it possible for us to design and develop smart, low-power yet very powerful instruments that can even fit in a SmallSat or CubeSat. We will also discuss the challenges of the future generation instruments in addressing the needs for critical scientific applications.
The research described herein was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA, under contract with National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Biography:

Goutam Chattopadhyay is a Senior Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology and a Visiting Professor at Caltech in Pasadena, USA. He has previously held the position of BEL Distinguished Visiting Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and served as an Adjunct Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, India. He earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Caltech in 2000. Chattopadhyay is a Fellow of both IEEE (USA) and IETE (India), serves as a Track Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, is an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, and is the 2025 President of IEEE MTT-S. His research interests include microwave, millimeter-wave, and terahertz receiver systems and radars, as well as the development of space instruments for the search for life beyond Earth.
He has published over 375 papers in international journals and conferences and holds more than twenty patents. He has received over 35 NASA Technical Achievement and New Technology Invention Awards. In 2024, he was honored with the Armstrong Medal from the Radio Company of America (RCA) and received the NASA-JPL People Leadership Award in 2023. He was named IEEE Region-6 Engineer of the Year in 2018 and received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), India, in 2017. Additionally, he has won the Best Journal Paper Award from IEEE Transactions on Terahertz Science and Technology in both 2020 and 2013, the Best Paper Award for Antenna Design and Applications at the European Antennas and Propagation Conference (EuCAP) in 2017, and the IETE Prof. S. N. Mitra Memorial Award in 2014, as well as the IETE Biman Bihari Sen Memorial Award in 2022.

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