Naderi, NASA scientist who led Mars missions
Firouz Naderi, an IranianAmerican scientist who directed the Mars program at NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory, including two successful landings on the planet, died June 9 in Los Angeles. He was 77.
His family said that 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,” Naderi said in a statement on Facebook after the accident.
Laurie Leshin, the director of the laboratory, said in an email that Naderi was “a visionary whose work impacted many of the space missions developed at JPL over the past three de - cades.” She also said he was a “brilliant mentor to those leading our space exploration missions today.” For many Iranians and Iranian- Americans, Naderi’s career demonstrated how far an immigrant could reach in America — in his case, literally for the stars. In an era when news of Iran was often negative, he was seen as a source of national pride. Many young Iranian scientists said he inspired their professional journeys.
Naderi was also an outspoken advocate for human rights and democracy in Iran. During the uprising against the government over the past year, he helped purchase and transfer about 100 Starlink satellite receivers to Iranian activists so they could log on to the internet without government restrictions.
He served on the boards of a number of nonprofit organizations focused on Iran- related issues including promoting civic engagement of Iranians and Iranian culture in the United States, and childhood education and the treatment for pediatric cancer in Iran.
He mentored dozens of Iranian scientists and university students in the United States and in Iran, whom he referred to as the children he never had.
In 2017, when Oscar- winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi asked Naderi and another scientist to accept his second Oscar, for “The Salesman” ( he was boycotting the ceremony in protest of President Donald Trump’s travel ban), Naderi speculated that the request had to do with his association with space travel.
“Once you go away from the Earth into space, and you look back at the Earth, you see it as a single blue marble,” he said. “You see no borders, no lines, separating people.”
Naderi was appointed to manage NASA’S Mars program in 2000. He is credited with retooling it after a couple of previous failures.
He directed at least five missions to Mars. He supervised the Mars Odyssey, a spacecraft launched in 2001 that is still orbiting 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 Opportunity, which explored the planet’s surface.
In 2006, he oversaw the launch of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is also looking for evidence of water.
Firouz Michael Naderi was born 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.
He left Iran in 1964 to attend Iowa State University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. After earning a doctorate in digital image processing at the University of Southern California, he returned to Iran in 1976.
He worked for the Iranian government as director of the Iranian Remote Sensing Agency, which used satellite data from the American Landsat program to monitor Iran’s natural resources, until the Islamic Revolution toppled the monarchy in 1979.
The country’s new leaders were suspicious of anyone with ties to the West, and Naderi fled to Los Angeles. He was hired by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a telecommunications engineer and, once there, developed an interest in space science.