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The Swiss-American astrophysicist has served as head of NASA's
science mission directorate since 2016, shepherding the agency's
roughly 100 such missions. He announced his planned departure in
a memo sent to NASA employees on Tuesday.
"This is a difficult decision for me, but I believe it is time
for a new beginning - for the directorate and for me," Zurbuchen
wrote.
His planned departure comes as NASA focuses heavily on sending
astronauts back to the moon and eventually to Mars under its
multibillion-dollar Artemis program begun in 2019.
Zurbuchen led the science directorate as it sent NASA's
Perseverance rover to the Martian surface, where it has
collected rock samples to study whether that planet once may
have had conditions conducive to life. The rover's mission also
included the flight of a helicopter on another planet for the
first time.
NASA launched the Webb telescope, the most powerful space
observatory ever built, last December, and in July it began to
provide spectacular images of the cosmos.
Zurbuchen's unit played an early role in Artemis with its
Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, an effort to deploy
privately built lunar landers to study the moon's surface before
people land there in the next few years.
He also played a crucial role in starting NASA's first-known
effort to examine unidentified aerial phenomena - better known
as UFOs - assembling a team of civilian scientists to assist a
Pentagon program in tracking and detecting mysterious objects in
the sky.
"From the diversity of the team he assembled, to delivering
countless successful space science missions that have changed
our view of the universe, to investing in new and better ways of
accomplishing space science goals and growing the overall
community, Thomas has been a force for positive change across
NASA," said Bobby Braun, the head of the Johns Hopkins Applied
Physics Lab's space exploration sector.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Will Dunham)
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