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Dr. Essam Heggy is a tenured Associate Professor of Geosciences of the French National Corps of Astronomers and Physicists (CNAP) at the Paris Institute of Planetary Physics (IPGP) in the University of Paris-Cité in France. He is also an affiliated faculty member at the Microwave Systems, Sensors, and Imaging Lab (MiXIL) at the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California and an affiliate researcher of the Earth Science Research & Mission Formulation Office (8300) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He obtained an MSc. and a Ph.D. with distinguished honors from the Sorbonne University (Paris VI-UPMC) in France on using radar sounding and imaging techniques to characterize subsurface water and volatiles in Earth’s deserts and planetary surfaces. His research focuses on understanding deserts' hydroclimatic, coastal, and environmental changes, including natural extremes such as droughts, floods, water stress, and coastal erosion, as well as environmental hazards such as oil spills and soil and water pollution. He also uses InSAR techniques to assess textural and geodetic changes in volcanic terrains to assess pre-eruptive activities as well as radar observations from planetary missions to study volatile distribution in planetary environments on Mars, the Moon, comets, asteroids, and Jovian icy moons.
Over two decades, Heggy contributed to developing several radar imaging and probing systems to characterize the surface and subsurface of arid terrains on Earth and other planets. Heggy’s expertise spans mission concept formulations, instrument system engineering, radar performance studies, laboratory electromagnetic characterization of materials, radar sounding, SAR and InSAR image analysis, numerical simulations of wave propagation (FDTD and HFSS), signal processing, and data analysis (Matlab, IDL, and ENVI) from different terrestrial and planetary orbital observations as well as management. He is currently a member of the science teams of the MARSIS instrument aboard the Mars Express orbiter, the Mini-SAR experiment aboard Chandrayaan-1, the Mini-RF experiment on board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the CONSERT radar experiment aboard the Rosetta mission, the Sounding Radar on the HERA mission, and the WISDOM GPR onboard the ESA EXOMARS Rover to be launched in July 2028 for Mars. Heggy is in charge of the NASA/JPL mission concept study OASIS, which is planning a group of five small satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). These satellites will use sounding radar reflectometry and probing to find out where shallow aquifers are located in hyper-arid areas, how thick the ice sheets are in Antarctica, and how these systems react to stresses caused by climate change and humans. He is also the principal investigator of an airborne-sounding radar mission concept aimed at mapping shallow aquifers in hyper-arid areas under formulation at USC and NASA Langley.
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