MOKUNO Masaaki is Director of Safety and Mission Assurance Department of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). He is responsible for agency wide S&MA activities such as mission assurance, safety and space operation safety, technical standards and so on.

Formerly, he was project manager of Global Change Observation Mission Climate (GCOM-C) and has been involved for many years in earth observation and technological demonstration satellite projects including GCOM-W, Optical Inter-orbit Communications Engineering Test Satellite (OICETS), and Engineering Test Satellite VII demonstrating unmanned rendezvous docking and space robotics missions.

He received Master of Engineering from Osaka University in 1990 and PhD degree in system engineering from Keio University in 2011.