Firouz Naderi, NASA scientist who led Mars missions, dies at age 77
Firouz Naderi, an Iranian-American scientist who led the Mars program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, including two successful landings on the planet, died June 9 in Los Angeles. He turned 77.
His family said Dr. Naderi died in a medical facility from complications of a fall last month that damaged his spinal cord and left him paralyzed. “Life is unpredictable,” said Dr. Naderi in a statement on Facebook after the accident.
Laurie Leshin, the lab’s director, said in an email that Dr. Naderi “was a visionary whose work influenced many of the space missions developed at JPL over the past three decades.” She also said he was a “brilliant mentor to those leading our space exploration missions today.”
For many Iranians and Iranian Americans, Dr. Naderi’s career at how far an immigrant in America could reach – in his case literally for the stars. At a time when news about Iran was often negative, he was seen as a source of national pride. Many young Iranian scientists said that he inspired their professional travels.
Dr. Naderi was also an outspoken advocate for human rights and democracy in Iran. During the uprising against the government last year, he helped purchase and hand over about 100 Starlink satellite receivers to Iranian activists so they could log onto the internet without government restrictions.
He has served on the boards of a number of non-profit organizations dealing with Iran-related issues, including promoting Iranian civic engagement and Iranian culture in the United States, and children’s education and childhood cancer treatment in Iran.
He tutored dozens of Iranian scientists and university students, in the United States and in Iran, whom he called the children he never had. In interviews, he often said that he considered influencing young minds his greatest achievement.
In 2017, when Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi Dr. Dr. Naderi and another scientist asked to accept his second Oscar, for “The Salesman” (he boycotted the ceremony in protest of President Donald J. Trump’s travel ban), said Dr. Naderi speculated that the request was related to his association with space travel.
“Once you go from Earth into space and you look back at Earth, you see her as a single blue marble,” he said. “You see no boundaries, no lines, separating people.”
Dr. Naderi was appointed in 2000 to lead NASA’s Mars program. He is credited with redesigning it after several previous failures.
He led at least five missions to Mars. He supervised the Mars Odyssey, a spacecraft launched in 2001 that still orbits the planet, collecting data to find out what Mars is made of and to detect water and ice. In 2004, he oversaw the landings of the robots Spirit And Possibilitywho explored the surface of the planet.
In 2006, he oversaw the launch of the Mars Exploration Orbiter, who is also looking for evidence of water. And he walked the Mars sample return program, which is expected to launch in two phases in 2027 and 2028 with the aim of returning samples collected by a previous rover back to Earth.
He was also the manager of the Origins program, which studies how life might exist on other worlds. And he laid the groundwork for NASA’s plan to launch an orbiter to orbit Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, in search of extraterrestrial life.
“Firouz Naderi was a giant,” said NASA Administrator and former Senator Bill Nelson on Twitter. “He helped redefine humanity’s knowledge of Mars and rekindled our sense of curiosity.”
Firouz Michael Naderi was born on March 25, 1946 in Shiraz, Iran, the youngest of three sons of Karim Naderi, a wealthy landowner, and Homa Ilchi, his third wife, who came from a prominent political family.
They divorced when Firouz was 4 years old. His father was given full custody and banned visits between the boys and their mother. Firouz was placed in the care of his father’s first wife, Ehteram Saltaneh Naderi, who raised him until he was 12.
Firouz was sent to a Roman Catholic boarding school in Tehran, where he was a star student and a math whiz. But a career in space exploration, he said in later interviews, was never on his radar.
He left Iran in 1964 to attend Iowa State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. After earning a PhD in digital imaging from the University of Southern California, he returned to Iran in 1976.
He worked for the Iranian government as director of Iran’s Remote Sensing Agency, which used satellite data from the US Landsat program to monitor Iran’s natural resources until the 1979 Islamic revolution toppled the monarchy.
The country’s new leaders distrusted anyone with ties to the West, and Dr. Naderi fled to Los Angeles. He was hired by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a telecommunications engineer and developed an interest in space science while there.
He quickly rose from various technical jobs to executive positions, first related to satellite programs and then to space exploration.
In his early forties, he married Parvin Kassaie, a fellow Iranian American who worked as the laboratory’s educational affairs office manager. The marriage only lasted a few years, but they remained good friends until Dr. Naderi.
Dr. Naderi is survived by his sisters, Pari Naderi, Mahin Naderi and Niloufar Arabsheibani, and his brothers, Kazem, Ahoura and Sia Naderi. Another brother, John, passed away last year.
After leaving the Mars program, Dr. Naderi associate director at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he oversaw new project strategies. He later served as the director of the Solar System Exploration Laboratory and oversaw missions to Saturn, Jupiter, and Europa.
Dr. Naderi longed to return to Iran, but he never did. During his time at NASA, he was advised not to travel there for safety reasons, and after he retired he became an outspoken critic of the Iranian government.
Kazem Naderi, an architect in New York, said his brother kept a jasmine plant on his balcony overlooking the Pacific Ocean because the scent reminded him of the gardens of Shiraz.
His compatriots treated him as a folk hero. When he visited London, Iranian university students chased his car and knocked on the windows, Ms Arabsheibani said in a telephone interview. Dr. Naderi stopped the car and got out to talk to the students.
“They asked for autographs and photos,” Ms. Arabsheibani said, “and he was so happy and humbled to talk to everyone.”
Dr. Naderi received NASA’s highest award, the Distinguished Service Medal, and an Ellis Island Medal of Honor for outstanding contributions to American society.
Upon his retirement in 2016, the International Astronomical Union named an asteroid after him at NASA’s request. The asteroid, 5515 Naderi, is a rock about six miles in diameter that orbits the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, far from the boundaries that separate Earth’s people.