Group 4 in June 1965. He resigned from NASA on August 18, 1969 without having been assigned to any spaceflight missions. Michel believed that it was his decision to resign (after it became clear that he would not be given a flight assignment) that motivated the scientific community to demand that his fellow scientist-astronaut Harrison Schmitt be reassigned to Apollo 17 (replacing Joe Engle) after Schmitt's planned mission on Apollo 18 was cancelled. After his resignation from NASA, Michel returned to teaching and research at Rice, where he also served as chair of the space physics and astronomy department from 1974 to 1979. He was the Andrew Hays Buchanan Professor of Astrophysics from 1974 until his retirement in 2000. Michel was named a Guggenheim Fellow to the École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France, from 1979 to 1980, and was awarded a Humboldt Prize to study in Heidelberg at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, in West Germany, from 1983 to 1984. Following his retirement, Michel spent the 2001–2002 academic year in Japan at the Solar-Terrestrial Environment Laboratory of the University of Nagoya as a visiting professor. Research Michel's research spanned many disciplines. In 1964, he predicted the existence of spin "optical rotation" due to parity nonconserving weak interactions. This phenomenon was experimentally confirmed in 1980 and is used to study parity nonconserving weak interactions between neutrons and nuclei. Michel is best known for his work on pulsars and neutron star magnetospheres but his work also included solar wind interactions with the Moon and other bodies, extending to the heliopause. In 2000, Michel officially retired from Rice but he continued to be active in research until his death in 2015. Books Michel is the author of the book Theory of Neutron Star Magnetospheres, University of Chicago Press, 1990 . Michel is the author of the book Handbook of High-Energy Astrophysics Experiments, Springer Verlag, 2015 . Michel was a contributor to the book NASA's Scientist-Astronauts by David Shayler and Colin Burgess, Springer Praxis, 2007 See also The Astronaut Monument References 1934 births 2015 deaths American astronauts United States Air Force officers Aviators from Wisconsin American physicists American astrophysicists Rice University faculty People from La Crosse, Wisconsin People from Sacramento, California California Institute of Technology alumni Military personnel from California Military personnel from Wisconsin