Most days, Firouz Naderi’s thoughts are hundreds of millions of miles away.  As the head of the Mars exploration program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he’s more worried about dust storms on Mars than he is about earthquakes in L.A.

 

            The USC Viterbi School of Engineering alumnus oversees a $600-million a year program at the space agency’s Pasadena facility.  The program is designed to explore Mars with robot spacecraft every 26 months, when Earth and Mars are in a favorable alignment.

 

This year, NASA scored a grand slam home run on Mars with the successful landing of two rovers on opposite sides of the planet.  Naderi was ecstatic, not only with the engineering success of the landings, but with all of the breakthrough science that has been streaming down.

 

“It all points to the existence of an ancient sea at one of the landing sites,” he says.   “The overarching objective of this program is to determine if Mars is, or ever was, a habitat for life.  The strategy we adopted was to ‘follow the water,’ since water appears to be a necessary ingredient for life.”

 

Mars has been a favorite target for planetary explorers.   For 40 years, the United States, Russia and the Europeans have been hurtling spacecraft by it and into it. 

 

“The first time we flew by a planet and took images, it was Mars,” Naderi says.  “The first time we orbited a planet, it was Mars.  The first time we landed on a planet, it was Mars. And the first time we roved around the surface of a planet, it was Mars. We go there often.”

 

But Mars rarely lays down the welcome mat for its robotic visitors.  Two-thirds of the nearly 40 spacecraft sent to Mars over the years by various space agencies around the world have failed to accomplish their missions.

 

“Batting 300 may be a good average in baseball, but not in the kind of business we are in, where missions cost hundreds of millions of dollars and people spend several years of their lives developing them,” he explains. 

 

Naderi was called in to lead the Mars program after the twin failures of an orbiter and lander in 1999.   The decade had begun with the rollout of NASA’s new “faster, better, cheaper” way of doing business.  It got off to a good start, with the highly successful 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission, but the success was short-lived. 

 

“In 1998, we tried to launch two missions for the price of one and lost both,” Naderi remembers.   “We were squeezed by our budget, and we had become a little bit too careless.”

 

The program was scrapped, and in summer of 2000, Naderi helped to design a more intricately woven program of missions, in which new space technologies were spread out evenly across multiple missions rather than being plopped on one spacecraft all at once.  He was assigned the responsibility for the end-to-end implementation of the new program and since then, has overseen a winning streak: three successful missions, including the spectacular landings of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers.

 

Naderi, who was born in Shiraz, Iran, and moved to America 40 years ago, did not start out with “a space bug” like many of his JPL colleagues.  He was hoping to become an architect.  “I found out that drawing was not one of my skills, so I went into electrical engineering,” he says.  First he earned a bachelor’s degree from Iowa State University, Ames, in 1969, and then went on for a master’s degree and Ph.D. in electrical engineering at USC.  

 

He studied image processing, “way back when microprocessors were just coming around,” attending USC on a partial scholarship from Iranian National Television.  After completing his doctoral work in 1976, he returned to Iran to work for the television network as part of the scholarship agreement.  At the end of a three-year stint, in 1979, Iran was at war and Naderi headed for JPL to take a job in telecommunications.      

 

            His early work at JPL was on system design of large satellite-based systems for nationwide cellular phone coverage.  From there, he went on to NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., for two years in the mid-1980s, and served as the program manager for the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS), the front-runner of today’s multi-beam, space-switching commercial satellites.

 

            Gradually, he grew interested in Earth-observing missions and became project manager for the NASA Scatterometer (NSCAT), a global weather-forecasting satellite aimed at making measurements of winds over the global oceans.   Later, he became manager of NASA’s Origins program, designed to search for life in the universe. His oversight of these programs earned him a NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal.    

 

In addition to his current responsibilities on the Mars program, Naderi also serves as director of the Solar System Exploration Program, which is focused on planetary exploration and astrobiology – the search for life outside of the solar system.  Like the majority of his colleagues, Naderi does not question the existence of life outside of the solar system.  He is quick to add that it will take time – perhaps many decades -- to find it, but that ultimately, that is what civilization will be remembered for. 

 

“People are really impatient, and this isn’t something as fast-paced as, say, a hockey game,” he says.  “But I have no doubt that in the universe, there is life outside of the Earth.  If, by chance, we find that there was life on Mars, however primitive, and that’s the first place we’ve ever looked, what do you think the possibilities are for life elsewhere in the universe?”

 

Naderi lives in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles, and when he is not exploring the geography on Mars, he enjoys hiking in the beautiful Santa Monica Mountains, right here on Earth.