Paolo Focardi of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Antenna developments for space applications have a long history at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Starting from the 70’s, Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, SRTM and more recently Aquarius, SMAP, SWOT, NISAR and INCUS are just a few major flight projects that required the design and development of very complex antenna systems for telecom, radar and radiometric applications. They were, and in most cases still are, the state of the art in antenna design for space applications. In the past we mostly relied on relatively simple RF models and formulations and did a considerable amount of prototype testing to validate antenna performance. In recent years RF modeling tools like HFSSTM, GRASPTM and a few more, have reached capabilities that were unimaginable just a few years back. At the same time, computer power and available memory have been increasing steadily. Thanks to this fertile ground it’s now possible to run extremely complex RF simulations of very large structures in a relatively short time with very good results. This presentation will guide the audience through a few examples of flight projects where very complex RF models have provided extremely accurate results and allowed the development of very complex instruments, some of which are still flying today.

Biography:

Paolo Focardi is a Group Lead for Technology Development at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in Computer Science and Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Florence, Italy, in 2002. During his PhD, he worked for the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and with NASA and DLR at the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). In 2001 he worked at Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the development of an accurate and comprehensive electromagnetic model of THz detectors between 600 GHz and 2.5 THz. In 2002, after defending his PhD, he joined the staff of JPL again as a Post-Doc and then became Staff Engineer in 2004. Between 2004 and 2009 he worked on remote sensing of human vital signs which led to the creation of two start-up companies and to the filing of several US patents. In 2008 he briefly supported the JUNO Mission, which is currently orbiting Jupiter, and then joined the team developing the instrument antenna for SMAP, including the first spinning deployable mesh reflector antenna ever flown by JPL. He was the first to model the entire SMAP observatory and to get very accurate predictions of the radiation patterns which were never measured on the ground. He was also responsible for the design and delivery of the COWVR instrument antenna, a flight project in collaboration between JPL and the US Air Force to measure wind speed over the ocean, which flew on the ISS. Starting in 2013 he led the development of the feed assembly for NISAR, a project in collaboration between NASA and ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organization, which was launched in 2025. He worked on INCUS between 2022 and 2025, an Earth science mission aimed at measuring how water vapor and droplets move inside tropical storms with three satellites flying in close formation in low Earth orbit equipped with ka-Band radars and deployable mesh reflectors. Recently he joined the VERITAS team and he is responsible for the VISAR antenna, a very large (4m) interferometric antenna made by 16 large panels of slotted waveguides. His work is focused on analytical and numerical methods in electromagnetism for the analysis and design of RF circuits and antennas. He has authored and co-authored over 80 journal and conference publications including two book chapters about reflector antennas. Within the IEEE Costal Los Angeles Section, he has been the chair of both the Antennas and Propagation Society and the Microwave Theory and Technology Society

Address:Italy