WASHINGTON — Retirements and reassignments have led to a reshuffling of leadership in part of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
At a Jan. 12 meeting of three astrophysics committees during the 245th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, announced he was now serving as acting deputy associate administrator for the science directorate. He replaces Sandra Connelly, who NASA said last fall was planning to retire at the end of the year.
Clampin said he accepted the one-year assignment to support the Science Mission Directorate during the transition to the new Trump administration. “They are very intense and take a lot of work,” he said of such transitions, recalling his experience in a previous position as director of science at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “I thought that the opportunity to assist [NASA Associate Administrator for Science] Nicky Fox as we go through this period was something that would overall contribute to the science that NASA does.”
Replacing Clampin as NASA astrophysics director for that one-year period will be Shawn Domagal-Goldman, deputy director of the science and exploration directorate at Goddard. He noted at the same meeting that he is in “day negative seven” of the position, which he formally starts next week.
He acknowledged that he and other officials in the astrophysics division were dealing with “uncertainty and change” amid the presidential transition. “Every layer of management, from them all the way to the top of the federal government, is going to undergo change in some way over the next month, and a lot of uncertainty, too.”
The change in NASA’s astrophysics division comes days after a similar change in its planetary science division, or PSD. In a Jan. 9 community letter, Fox announced that the agency has hired Louise Prockter as acting planetary science division director, starting in the spring. Prockter has been the chief scientist for the space exploration sector at the Applied Physics Laboratory and previously was director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute.
The leadership of the planetary science division had been in flux since last May, when longtime director Lori Glaze took what was to be a six-month detail as acting deputy associate administrator in NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate (ESDMD). However, in November, NASA announced that Glaze would remain in that position in ESDMD permanently.
During the detail, Gina DiBraccio, deputy director of the heliophysics division at Goddard, served as acting planetary science director. Fox said at a town hall meeting during the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December that DiBraccio’s detail could not be extended and that she had returned to Goddard. In addition, Eric Ianson, deputy director of the planetary science division, announced his retirement at the end of the year.
That meant that Charles Webb, who had just been hired to succeed Ianson as planetary science deputy director, was almost immediately pressed into the role of acting division director. Fox said at the town hall that Webb would be acting director for a “short period” before bringing on someone for a one-year detail.
“Louise’s deep planetary science and organizational leadership experience uniquely qualifies her for this critical leadership position,” Fox wrote in the letter. “There are multiple major challenges in PSD that require a highly experienced leader to navigate, including the future direction of Mars Sample Return, ensuring Dragonfly is ready for launch in 2028, and confirmation of NASA’s contribution to the ESA Rosalind Franklin Mars rover mission.”
Fox, in the community letter, confirmed comments at the earlier town hall that the agency will conduct a competition to find a permanent division director.
