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The occasion was the OPERA Stakeholder Engagement Workshop, attended by ~20 people in person (pictured) and 200 online. OPERA is a NASA-funded project making value-added remote sensing data products operationally (surface displacement time series, surface disturbance, surface inundation and more)!

I also got to meet a scale model of NISAR in the building lobby

And one of the staff (Reynato) kindly offered to take three of us on a tour of the campus to show us all the cool things – the Mars Yard (with model of the Perseverance rover), the clean rooms used for assembly, mission control, the museum...

So would that be used mostly for space-related stuff or are there also uses on Earth?

It is all for Earth - the surface disturbance product shows you the locations of landslides and wildfires, the inundation product is for flooding, the displacement product (what I use) shows us where the ground may be subsiding or moving as landslides. The workshop was to highlight potential uses!

I’m surprised there aren’t bears at JPL.

I asked! Not recently, it seems. The deer have attracted the interest of mountain lions in the past though!