In Los Angeles, Ghaffari celebrated at a small party with a very large cake decorated with a picture in icing of an Apollo moon mission launch.
Born in Tehran, Ghaffari was educated at the Darolfonoun School. He went to France in 1929 where he took his undergraduate degree from Nancy University in mathematics in 1932. He obtained his doctorate in 1936 from the Sorbonne.
He returned to Iran where he joined the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Tehran and served there from 1941 to 1956.
After World War II, he was a research associate in mathematics at Princeton University. In the early 1950s, he worked with Albert Einstein on the Unified Field Theory of Gravitation and Electromagnetism.
In 1956, Ghaffari moved permanently to the US to become a senior mathematician at the US National Bureau of Standards. Part of his work there involved calculations of the motion of artificial satellites.
In 1964, three years into the manned space program, he joined the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington, DC. There he studied the mathematical aspects of transiting from the Earth to moon and back and analytical methods for making midcourse maneuvers in space travel. In simplified terms, his goal was to make sure the Apollo entered the orbit of the moon and did not bypass it.
For his work, Ghaffari was given the US Special Apollo Achievement award at a White House ceremony with President Nixon in 1969.