His 35 years of professional experience encompass conceptual design, payload trades, detailed component design, and hardware test for commercial and military satellites. He holds 32 United States patents.
Prasun Desai is the project's senior engineer and Entry, Descent and Landing lead engineer, Langley Research Centre, Virginia, one of the four agencies working on the Phoenix project. The other three are NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, University of Arizona and Lockheed Martin Space Systems