Jakob van Zyl, an engineer who held crucial positions at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was involved in numerous space exploration missions over decades, has died. He was 63.

"JPL and NASA are richer for his many technical and managerial contributions, and for his unwavering dedication and engaging personality," JPL Director Michael Watkins said in a statement. Van Zyl's roles included director for astronomy and physics, director for solar system exploration and associate director on a project to formulate a vision for JPL's future. At JPL he contributed to the design and development of many synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems, including SIR-C, SRTM, AIRSAR, TOPSAR, and GeoSAR. 

In 1997, he received the Fred Nathanson Memorial Radar Award for advancement of radar polarimetry, radar interferometry, and synthetic aperture radar from the Aerospace and Electronics Systems Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE). In 1998, Dr van Zyl was elected Fellow of the IEEE GRSS. In 2010, he received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society of the IEEE for his contributions to polarimatric SAR remote sensing. 

Van Zyl was involved in missions that sent the Juno spacecraft to Jupiter, Dawn to the asteroid belt, Cassini to Saturn, and the InSight Mars lander and its tying accompanying CubeSat spacecraft. He was also involved in the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission currently en route to the red planet, as well as development of future missions.

A native of Namibia, van Zyl received a degree in electronics engineering from Stellenbosch University in South Africa and earned his master's and doctorate in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology.JPL said van Zyl was passionate about encouraging young people in Namibia and South Africa to pursue science. 

Caltech has established the Jakob vanZyl Memorial Fund to support research and/or scholarship for students in the EE department where Jakob studied, graduated, conducted research for most of his career and taught for more than 20 years. You may make tax deductible contributions online at https://caltech.imodules.com/vanzylmemorial or checks may be mailed to the Jakob vanZyl Memorial Fund c/o Caltech, MC 5-32, Pasadena, CA  91125.