Firouz Naderi, director of NASA’s Mars program, celebrating the landing of the Opportunity rover on Mars in 2004.Credit...T. Wynne/NASA

By Farnaz Fassihi, The New York Times

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.

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.

“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, left, with Jennifer Trosper and Ray Arvidson, other members of the Mars Exploration Rover Project, at a news conference in 2004 after the rover found rocks expected to reveal information about the presence of water on the planet.Credit...Ric Francis/Associated Press

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 >>>