�Iranian Professor, Firouz Naderi, who exercised leadership at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration for over three decades, has passed away at the age of 77.






Born in the southern Iranian city of Shiraz in 1946, Professor Naderi had been residing in the United States since he was about 18, Young Journalists Club, a subsidiary of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, reported on Saturday morning.

Management of Spirit and Opportunity projects is on the list of records of the decorated Iranian-American engineer while an asteroid was named after him in the solar system seven years ago.

Mr. Naderi also had received the NASA outstanding leadership medal for his great efforts.

�It will be going around the Sun for billions of years after I am gone,� the figure reacted when he learned that an asteroid had been named after him.

It was last week that Naderi, the former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL),�released a photo of himself on a hospital bed showing him paralyzed from neck to down after an accident.

In 2017, Firouz Naderi, along with engineer Anousheh Ansari, another Iranian national, had accepted Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi�s Academy Award on his behalf.

Commenting on the reason for accepting to represent Farhadi at the 89th Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood, Naderi had said that the film by the Iranian filmmaker was a brilliant one, nominated for an Oscar long before Trump�s ban on Muslim migration.