Mr. Chad A. Baldi received both B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has worked in the remote sensing industry since 2004 and has had a major role in the development of dozens of customized remote sensing instruments for ground-based, mobile, airborne, and spaceflight applications.

In 2014, Mr. Baldi joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he was active in hardware development and technical project management for several spaceflight missions. He served as the product delivery lead for the Terminal Descent Sensor landing radar on the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Mission and also co-managed the integration / test campaign for the HF power amplifier subsystem of the Radar for Icy Moon Exploration instrument for the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission. In addition to his technical management roles, he designed / built several precision RF instruments to qualify key subsystems of the Ka-band Radar Interferometer for the Surface Water Ocean Topography mission. He also served as the lead system architect for numerous airborne and ground-based research instruments at JPL, including a novel three-band snowpack tomography radar.

Prior to joining JPL, Mr. Baldi served as a technical project manager for a remote sensing company specializing in the customization of radar and radiometer instruments for both research and industrial applications. Among his accomplishments, he developed and fielded several in situ scatterometers at S-, C-, X-, and Ku-bands for snow and sea ice characterization, mobile radars for tornado research, and an airborne Ku-band wide swath radar altimeter to investigate the air-sea interaction within hurricanes. He also led the development of several polarimetric Ka-band atmospheric radars, which are currently deployed worldwide to study cloud dynamics.