Dr. Asal Naseri
Associate Flight Director (Acting)
Dr. Asal Naseri is the acting associate flight director for NASA’s heliophysics division in the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. She leads the programmatic and technical management of the flight portfolio for more than 20 operational missions and several in development. In this role, she ensures that missions meet technical, budgetary, and scientific milestones, arrive safely at the launch pad, and meet their science goals in space.
Before being named associate flight director, Dr. Naseri was a program executive in the Heliophysics Division, overseeing missions such as Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE), HelioSwarm, and Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) as well as coordinating the Heliophysics Explorers Program.
Prior to joining NASA, Dr. Naseri was the satellite technologies branch lead in Space Dynamics Laboratory’s (SDL) Civil Space Division, overseeing program execution of small satellite projects, such as the Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (SunRISE) and the Hyper-Angular Rainbow Polarimeter (HARP) missions. Before SDL, she was a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in Albuquerque. While at UNM, she led a student research group working on the Virtual Telescope for X-ray Observations (VTXO), a formation flying mission funded by the NASA EPSCoR program. She also taught courses in space engineering, dynamics, and systems and control fields.
Dr. Naseri earned her PhD in Aerospace Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has subject matter expertise in spacecraft systems engineering, dynamics, and formation flying of small satellites.