Joe King Retires from NASA, NSSDC

Dr. Joseph H. King, the Head of National Space Science Data Center since 1992, is retiring from NASA on January 3, 2003. Joe has spent a 34-year government career at the NSSDC, except for a 5-year stint at Goddard's Laboratory for Extraterrestrial Physics and two 1-year stints as a detailee at NASA Headquarters. He originally came to Goddard as a National Academy of Sciences postdoctoral associate in the now-defunct Laboratory for Theoretical Physics in 1967.

Joe is proud of several of his contributions to NASA and to the international space science enterprise, including -

the evolution of NSSDC as both as a data archive and as a provider of data to the space science research community and to the general public;

the value-added data products and interfaces he's been involved with, especially OMNI, the 1963-2002 multi-spacecraft compilation of cross-normalized hourly solar wind magnetic field and plasma data, energetic particle data and solar and geomagnetic activity index data;

his role as Project Scientist for the IMP 8 spacecraft, now in its 30th year of in-space operations and, among other things, the most significant OMNI contributor historically.

He is very pleased to have worked for many years with excellent and customer-committed NSSDC staffers, both government and contractor, and to have interacted with excellent people worldwide who have been providers of data and information to NSSDC as well as consumers of NSSDC's data and services.