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Firouz Michael Naderi (b. March 25, 1946 – d. June 9, 2023) was an Iranian American scientist who spent 36 years in various technical and executive positions at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where he contributed to some of America's robotic space missions.
Naderi retired from NASA in 2016 and became a management consultant, an advisor to early-stage high-tech startups, and a public speaker. He was based in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.
Firouz Michael Naderi was born on March 15, 1946, in Shiraz, Iran, however, his birth was recorded on March 25, 1946. His elementary education was in Shiraz, Iran. He attended high school in Tehran, Iran at highly valued Alborz High School and left Iran in 1964 for the United States to pursue his college education. He received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering at Iowa State University (ISU) in 1969 before moving to California. After working as an engineer in Santa Barbara for two years, he enrolled at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles where he received his M.S. in 1972 and his Ph.D. in 1976 both in electrical engineering.
After completing his education, Naderi went back to Iran for three years, working at the Iranian Remote Sensing Agency but returned to America in July 1979 a few months after Iran's revolution. He never returned to Iran.
Naderi was fluent in English in addition to his native Persian language.
Naderi started at NASA's JPL in September 1979 as a communications system engineer, and in a course of a three-decade career rose through the ranks to senior executive positions. His career at JPL spanned system engineering, technology development, program and project management for satellite communications systems, Earth remote sensing observatories, astrophysical observatories, and planetary systems.
His early work at JPL was on system design of large satellite-based systems for nationwide cellular phone coverage. He went to NASA Headquarters for two years in the mid-1980s to serve as the program manager for the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS), the frontrunner of today's multi-beam, space-switching commercial satellites. Upon his return to JPL, he became the project manager for the NASA Scatterometer (NSCAT) project aimed at space-based radar measurement of winds over the global oceans with application to weather forecasting. He was awarded NASA's Outstanding Leadership Medal for his management of this project. Following NSCAT, in the mid-1990s he managed the Origins Program, NASA's ambitious, technology-rich plan, to search for Earth-like planets in other planetary systems.
Naderi was named NASA's Program Manager for Mars exploration in April 2000 after the agency had suffered two consecutive, very public failures in the previous year. In the summer of 2000, he helped re-plan the Program as a chain of scientifically, technologically and operationally interrelated missions with a spacecraft launched to Mars every two years. He led the Program for the next five years, a span of time that included the successful landing of the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. All told, from 2000 to 2012 there has been an unprecedented 6 consecutive successful American missions to Mars (4 landers and 2 orbiters) based on the roadmap devised in the summer of 2000. For management of the Mars Program, in 2005 Naderi was awarded NASA's highest award, the NASA Distinguished Service Medal.
After the Mars Program, Naderi was appointed JPL's first associate director for Project Formulation and Strategy, serving as the Laboratory's senior official providing oversight of JPL new business acquisition and senior strategic planning officer. He created JPL's Innovation Foundry, an internal startup ecosystem akin to accelerator/incubator outfits in Silicon Valley. For six years, he managed an annual $100M internal investment fund for identifying and maturing nascent technologies, and mission concepts that showed the potential to grow into funded space projects.
During his last five years at JPL, he was Director of Solar System Exploration with responsibility for the Cassini spacecraft at Saturn, Dawn mission to Asteroids Vesta and Ceres, Juno mission to Jupiter, and formulation of the first-ever Mars helicopter, and a multi-billion-dollar mission to Europa (a moon of Jupiter) in search of life outside of Earth.
After 36 years, Naderi retired from NASA in February 2016. At a farewell party in his honor, it was announced that the International Astronomical Union had renamed Asteroid 1989 EL1 as Asteroid "5515 Naderi" for his contribution to space exploration. The asteroid was discovered by the late American astronomer, Eleanor F. Helin, at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, on March 5, 1989, and is about 10 kilometers (6 miles) in diameter. It rotates about itself every 5.2 hours and orbits the Sun every 4.4 years.
In his post-NASA career, Naderi served as a management consultant, an advisor to early-stage high-tech startups, and a public speaker. He also served as a coach and mentor to the next generation of leaders within the Iranian-American community.
Naderi was an advocate for the Iranian-American diaspora formerly having served on the board of directors of Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA). He also served on the advisory boards of several philanthropic organizations, including on Arasteh-Amin Foundation, and in the past on Keep Children in School Foundation (KCIS), and International Society of Children with Cancer (ISCC), and was a board member of Iranica Encyclopedia.
When asked, after living 50 years in America, whether he felt more American or Persian, Naderi said,
Naderi was a registered Democrat. His view on the political system in Iran is that the people living in Iran should decide what is the best system of government for them. However, he favored a democratically elected, secular government, observing full civil liberties and human rights with separation of "church" and state. He had no religious affiliation. However, in an interview in 2011, he called himself a "spiritual" person, believing in "something" beyond himself, but not within the framework of any religion.
Naderi and Anousheh Ansari represented Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi at the 89th Academy Awards for his winning in the Best Foreign Language Film category. Because of Farhadi's absence due to President Trump's 2017 immigration restrictions regarding seven Muslim countries including Iran; Farhadi selected Naderi and Ansari as his representatives at the Oscars, given that both of them were successful Iranian-Americans who immigrated to the United States. On February 26, 2017, Naderi and Ansari accepted the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for The Salesman on Farhadi's behalf. In the press briefing after the award when asked why he and Anousheh were chosen by the filmmaker to accept the award, he replied that it likely was because both Anousheh and he have a space perspective of Earth, "As you pull away from the Earth and look back at it all you see is a beautiful blue planet without any lines, borders or – walls. Home to all of us".
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Firouz Naderi, NASA Scientist Who Led Mars Missions, Dies at 77
In a career that was an inspiration to Iranians and Iranian Americans, he oversaw multiple missions to Mars, including two successful landings.
Firouz Naderi, an Iranian American scientist who directed the Mars program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, including two successful landings on the planet, died on June 9 in Los Angeles. He was 77.
His family said that 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,” Dr. Naderi said in a statement on Facebook after the accident.
Laurie Leshin, the director of the laboratory, said in an email that Dr. Naderi was “a visionary whose work impacted many of the space missions developed at JPL over the past three decades.” She also said that he was a “brilliant mentor to those leading our space exploration missions today.”
For many Iranians and Iranian Americans, Dr. 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.
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Dr. 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. He often said in interviews that he considered influencing young minds to be his biggest accomplishment.
In 2017, when the Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi asked Dr. Naderi and another scientist to accept his second Oscar, for “The Salesman” (he was boycotting the ceremony in protest of President Donald J. Trump’s travel ban), Dr. Naderi speculated that the request had to do with his association with space travel.
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“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.”
Dr. 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. And he ran the Mars Sample Return program, which is scheduled to launch in two phases in 2027 and 2028 with the goal of returning samples collected by an earlier rover to Earth.
He was also the manager of the Origins program, which studies how life could exist on other worlds. And he laid the groundwork for NASA’s plan to launch an orbiter to circle Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, to search for extraterrestrial life.
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“Firouz Naderi was a giant,” the NASA administrator and former senator Bill Nelson said on Twitter. “He helped to redefine humanity’s knowledge about Mars and reinvigorate 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 gained full custody and banned visits between the boys and their mother. Firouz was placed under 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 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.
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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 Dr. 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.
He rose quickly from various technical jobs to executive positions, related first to satellite programs and then to space exploration.
In his early 40s, he married Parvin Kassaie, a fellow Iranian American who worked as the laboratory’s educational affairs office manager. The marriage lasted only a few years, but they remained close friends until Dr. Naderi’s death.
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, died last year.
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After leaving the Mars program, Dr. Naderi became an associate director at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, overseeing new project strategies. He was later the laboratory’s director of solar system exploration, overseeing 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 security reasons, and after he retired he became an outspoken critic of Iran’s government.
Kazem Naderi, an architect in New York, said that his brother kept a jasmine plant on his balcony facing the Pacific Ocean because the scent reminded him of the gardens of Shiraz.
His countrymen treated him like a folk hero. When he visited London, Iranian university students chased his car, knocking on the windows, Ms. Arabsheibani said in a telephone interview. Dr. Naderi stopped the car and got out to talk to the students.
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“They asked for autographs and pictures,” Ms. Arabsheibani said, “and he was so pleased and humble, talking to everyone.”
Dr. Naderi received NASA’s highest award, the Distinguished Service Medal, and an Ellis Island Medal of Honor for distinguished 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 orbiting the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, far from the borders separating people on Earth.
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