Ravi Kumar Kopparapu is a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where he has worked since 2015 in the Planetary Environments Branch. His research covers the habitability of planets around other stars, climate modeling and the characterization of exoplanet atmospheres. Since 2020 he has been one of the more visible mainstream scientists calling for scientific study of unidentified anomalous phenomena, and in 2026 he co-wrote analyses of the military sensor videos released by the U.S. government.

Kopparapu earned a bachelor's degree in electronics at Nagarjuna University in India in 1996 and a master's in physics at the University of Pune in 1998, then a master's and, in 2006, a doctorate in physics at Louisiana State University. After postdoctoral work at LSU and at Penn State's Center for Gravitational-Wave Astronomy, he joined the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Virtual Planetary Laboratory at Penn State in 2010. In 2013 he was lead author of "Habitable Zones Around Main-Sequence Stars: New Estimates," with James Kasting and others, which revised the range of distances at which a planet could keep liquid water on its surface. He co-leads Goddard's Sellers Exoplanet Environment Collaboration and received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 2020.

Much of his recent work concerns technosignatures. With Jacob Haqq-Misra and other colleagues he led a 2021 study in The Astrophysical Journal on nitrogen dioxide pollution as a possible sign of technology on other worlds. The two also wrote for general readers about UFOs: a July 2020 Scientific American essay argued that unidentified aerial phenomena are "a scientifically interesting problem" that interdisciplinary teams should study, and a May 2021 Washington Post opinion piece followed. Kopparapu spoke on the science of UAP at an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics session in August 2021.

In August 2026 he and Haqq-Misra posted a preprint examining all 112 sensor videos released through PURSUE. They found that none supplied all four quantities needed to turn on-screen motion into physical speed: range, the aircraft's velocity, aspect angle and the camera's field angle. One clip could not distinguish a nearby bird from a large craft at Mach 5 a kilometer away, while another, with a vessel of known size, set an upper limit of Mach 0.4; the authors concluded that the videos in their present form cannot fully resolve unidentified cases. The pair discussed the study with John Michael Godier on Event Horizon in September. In October Kopparapu co-authored a paper led by Haqq-Misra, described by co-author Michael Shermer as the first from members of the UAP Science Advisory Council, finding that six objects reported at 480 mph in a declassified infrared video flickered at bird wingbeat rates. Skeptic Mick West accepted that the objects were birds but called the paper "perhaps overkill."

Kopparapu brings a record in exoplanet habitability and technosignature research to his long-running argument that UAP belong within ordinary science. His 2026 work with Haqq-Misra stands out less for any claim about what the objects were than for setting out the range, platform and sensor data the government's released footage lacks.