NASA Honors Moroccan Scientist Kamal Oudrhiri with Exceptional Service Medal

The Moroccan scientist, after twenty years of service within the leading agency for aerospace and space exploration, received this year five team excellence awards that NASA awards for the success of space missions.

Even before this distinction, the Moroccan had been awarded three "JPL Mariner" Honors Awards from NASA, three "JPL Voyager" Honors Awards and 39 Team Excellence Awards, making him officially one of the most awarded within NASA over the past 20 years.

In 2017, the Moroccan was awarded the "People Leadership Award", which rewards exceptional human leadership skills, essential to the continued success of NASA’s exploration missions.

As the project manager of the "Cold Atom Lab (CAL)", a quantum physics facility that creates the coldest matter in the known universe, Kamal Oudrhiri has contributed to various cutting-edge projects within the Agency.

Among his projects, we note the Cold Atom Laboratory, the InSight Mission on Mars, MarCO, the first interplanetary CubeSat mission, the MAVEN (ROSE) scientific radio occultation experiment, as well as the mission nicknamed "New Horizons ultima thule", the first flyby of the Kuiper Belt (KBO), a distant and hitherto unexplored land located more than a billion kilometers from Pluto.

Currently responsible for the Planetary Radar & Radio Sciences group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Kamal Oudrhiri has held several other leadership positions in several major NASA missions: The Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), the international Cassini mission to Saturn, the GRAIL mission, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), the Juno Jupiter mission, the New Horizons mission to Pluto and recently the InSight mission on Mars and MarCO, the very first interplanetary CubeSat mission.

According to the scientist, decorated by King Mohammed VI, who remains attached to his origins and to Morocco, his "intention is above all to give hope to young Moroccans, but at the same time to convey an important message to young people, namely that humility is a virtue. "As soon as the person ceases to be humble, he will simply cease to learn," said the Moroccan scientist to MAP.

Kamal Oudrhiri will soon host a major scientific and technological event organized by the US Embassy in Rabat in November, the Moroccan Youth Moonshot Festival, an event organized on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, of Apollo 11 which took place on July 20, 1969.