By Mary O’KEEFE

This week Jet Propulsion Laboratory director Michael Watkins announced he was leaving the head position at the lab to move to the Caltech campus as professor of aerospace and geophysics.

Watkins served for five years as JPL director. He had worked at JPL for 22 years and, just prior to taking the director position, he had served at the Clare Cockrell Williams Centennial as chair in aerospace engineering and director of the Center for Space Research at the University of Texas at Austin. He has a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering.

He became director of JPL on July 1, 2016, following then-director Charles Elachi, who retired on June 30 that same year and moved onto the Caltech faculty.

“There is not a place in the world like JPL. It has truly been the great joy of my life to dedicate almost three decades to JPL, and to spend the last five years leading the Lab is the highest honor,” Watkins said in an announcement on Monday. “I treasure above all my interactions with the incredible people who make JPL what it is and who dedicate lifetimes to mission success after mission success.”

“Under Watkins’ tenure as director, JPL launched and operated several new missions for NASA, including Earth missions ECOSTRESS, Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3, GRACE Follow-On and Sentinel 6. Planetary missions include the ongoing operations of Juno at Jupiter, as well as the launches and landings of the InSight mission and Perseverance rover on Mars. Watkins has also guided future missions in development, including the Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, the Mars Sample Return campaign, and the VERITAS mission to Venus,” according to the JPL release.

The ECOSTRESS mission is answering questions including how the terrestrial biosphere is responding to changes in water availability, how changes in vegetation water stress impact the global carbon cycle and can agricultural vulnerability be reduced through advanced monitoring of agricultural water consumption and improved drought estimation.

The Perseverance rover took along the Ingenuity Mars helicopter, the first aircraft to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet.

Watkins will be stepping down on Aug. 20 and JPL deputy director Larry D. James will serve as interim JPL director and also vice president at Caltech until a successor for Watkins is selected. As deputy director, James has acted as the Laboratory’s chief operating officer leading the day-to-day management of JPL’s resources and activities. Prior to his appointment as deputy director, Lt. Gen. James had a 35-year career in the U.S. Air Force where he held multiple roles, including commander of the 14th Air Force at Vandenberg AFB and Air Force deputy chief of staff for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance at the Pentagon.

Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum has formed a search committee to find the next director of JPL.