Farouk El-Baz

Farouk El-Baz (born 2 January 1938) is an Egyptian-American geologist and space scientist; his full name is Farouk Mohamed Sayed El-Baz. ^{1 2} He worked with NASA in the scientific exploration of the Moon and the planning of the Apollo programme, as a leading geologist responsible for studying the geology of the Moon, selecting landing sites for the Apollo missions and training astronauts in lunar observations and photography, and he played a key role in the Apollo 11 landing mission of 1969 and in later missions. ² He later founded and directed the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University, and became known for his research on the origin and evolution of deserts and on locating groundwater from satellite images. ²

El-Baz was born on 2 January 1938 in Zagazig, Sharqia Governorate, to Muslim Egyptian parents, and his family is originally from the Nile Delta village of Toukh el-Aqlam, in the Senbellawein centre of Dakahlia Governorate. ² His father, Sheikh Mohamed El-Baz, was a graduate of Al-Azhar who taught Mohamed Metwalli Al-Sha'rawi and worked as a teacher of religious sciences in Damietta; he cared for the education of his nine children, among them Farouk's brother Osama El-Baz, who became an adviser to President Hosni Mubarak. ¹ The Worldwide Cancer Network biography gives his birth date as 1 January 1938 rather than 2 January, and the Egyptian-Arabic article gives Banha as his birthplace and the Persian article Senbellawein; this record follows Ain Shams University and the English article — Zagazig, 2 January 1938 — and notes the other readings here. ^{3 4}

He received a BSc in chemistry and geology from Ain Shams University in 1958, taught geology at Assiut University from 1958 to 1960, received a master's in geology from the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy in 1961, conducted research at MIT in 1962–63, and received his PhD in geology from the Missouri University of Science and Technology in 1964, at the age of twenty-six. ^{2 4} He then taught geology at Heidelberg University in Germany in 1964–65, and in 1966 joined the Pan American–U.A.R. Oil Company, where he participated in the discovery of El-Morgan, the first offshore oil field in the Gulf of Suez. ²

Al Jazeera's profile recounts that he returned to Egypt after his doctorate having shipped, at his own expense, four tons of rock samples he had collected, hoping to found the first centre for economic geology — but the ministry that had sent him on scholarship posted him as a chemistry teacher at an institute in Suez; his grievance reached President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and El-Baz considered the affair a bureaucratic evasion. ¹

From 1967 to 1972 El-Baz participated in the Apollo programme as Supervisor of Lunar Science Planning at Bellcomm Inc., a division of AT&T that conducted systems analysis for NASA. ² In those six years he was Secretary of the Landing Site Selection Committee for the Apollo lunar missions, Principal Investigator of Visual Observations and Photography, and Chairman of the Astronaut Training Group. ² He pored over detailed photographs of the Moon's surface to select the most precise landing locations, performed the same role for the Apollo 15 Lunar Roving Vehicle mission in 1971, and trained the astronauts in visual observation and space photography and in which rocks to collect and how to collect lunar soil. ² The astronauts nicknamed him "the King", and Apollo 15 Command Module Pilot Alfred Worden said while orbiting the Moon for the first time: "After the King's training, I feel like I've been here before." ² His idea of touchable Moon rocks at a museum was inspired by his childhood pilgrimage to Mecca, where he touched the Black Stone. ² His role was featured in Tom Hanks's HBO series From the Earth to the Moon in a segment entitled "The Brain of Farouk El-Baz", and a shuttle craft named El-Baz appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation. ²

After the Apollo programme ended in 1972, El-Baz joined the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, to establish and direct the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum, and in 1973 NASA selected him as principal investigator of the Earth Observations and Photography Experiment on the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, the first joint American–Soviet space mission, in July 1975. ^{2 4} In 1978 President Anwar Sadat appointed him Science Adviser, charged with selecting regions for desert land reclamation without detrimental effects on the environment, and awarded him Egypt's Order of Merit, First Class. ² He was vice president of Itek Optical Systems from 1982 until he joined Boston University in 1986 as founding director of its Center for Remote Sensing, which NASA designated a Center of Excellence in Remote Sensing in 1997; he has since retired. ² He was also a Senior Advisor to President Hosni Mubarak. ²

From 1986 El-Baz used satellite images at Boston University to study the origin and evolution of desert landforms, and he is credited with providing evidence that the desert is not man-made but the result of major climatic variations; his research uncovered numerous sand-buried rivers and streams in the Sahara from the interpretation of radar images. ² These former watercourses lead into depressions he theorized must contain groundwater, and his analyses located groundwater in the arid terrains of Egypt, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, and perhaps Darfur in Sudan. ² He announced a paleo-drainage from the Arabian Peninsula into the Persian Gulf, which he called the Kuwait River — popularly Wadi al-Batin, an extension of Wadi al-Rummah — from radar images taken by the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1994. ² In a 2002 National Geographic documentary he proposed that the ancient Egyptians chose pyramid-shaped tombs because monumental pyramidal landforms abounding in Egypt's Western Desert evade erosion, a shape they knew from an earlier nomadic life. ²

El-Baz was elected a member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2002, for selecting the landing sites for the Apollo missions and for pioneering methods of discovering subsurface freshwater from space observations. ^{2 5} The Geological Society of America Foundation established the Farouk El-Baz Award for Desert Research in 1999 and the Farouk El-Baz Student Research Award in 2007; asteroid 7371 El-Baz was named in his honour, with the naming citation published on 27 August 2019; and the Carnegie Corporation of New York named him among its Great Immigrants honorees in 2009. ²

This section sets out positions as the sources report them; it is not a verdict by the museum. The English article records that in April 2011 he joined the liberal Free Egyptians Party founded by the telecommunications tycoon Naguib Sawiris, and that he had been a Senior Advisor to President Mubarak and, earlier, Science Adviser to President Sadat; the museum records these roles as reported, without evaluation. ² On Darfur, Reuters reported in 2007 that the ancient underground lake he identified might bring peace to the region, while BBC News reported the same year that the lake might have dried up; this record presents both reports as they were published at the time. ² As to his school of Islam, no source consulted names one: the English article gives Muslim parents and a childhood pilgrimage, which are family background and personal history, not a school attestation, so the value in his data remains unknown. ²

He is married, has four daughters and seven grandchildren; Al Jazeera names his wife Patricia and his daughters Mounira, Thuraya, Karima and Fayrouz. ^{2 1} The museum records no further family detail.

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