Rita Sosa, our friend and Contamination Control Technician for many years, has retired from Lockheed Martin. Rita, who played a hypercritical role in the Lunar Curatorial Laboratories, spent many years keeping all of us in shape and the laboratories contamination free. Her duties included upkeep of the Lunar Sample Facility (Pristine and Return Sample Laboratories), Meteorite Laboratory, Cosmic Dust and Foils Laboratories, Final Clean Laboratory and others. She also assisted with laboratory tours, film crews and other aspects of curation. Her work has been commended by the NASA management, dignitaries, scientists, coworkers and all who experienced the facilities. Throughout Rita's service, the 25 years at NASA-JSC entailed duties with Johnson Controls, Northrop Services, Inc., Syscom, Inc., as well as Lockheed Martin.

Rita is a loving wife, mother of eight wonderful adult children and grandmother of eleven beautiful children. She also has many step-children and step-grandchildren. She retired to spend more time caring for her husband, Julio who is retired from Southern Pacific Railroad after 39 years of dedicated service as a foreman.

During her "off work" time, Rita is a collector of "elephants", crochets and make photo albums. She and Julio participates in lots of community activities for the betterment of their neighborhood, as well as the city of Houston. They have, many times, accepted children without places to live into their home until they finished school or until they find other residences. They also aid school children by assisting in purchasing school supplies, clothing and food. Training and educating our youth is very important to Rita. She also is considered an angel by the patients in her neighborhood dialysis center. She is certainly a compassionate, charitable humanitarian.

We will miss Rita's smile, wit, and professionalism. She has a way of making you smile and laugh whenever you are in her presence. She says laughter is cleansing for the soul. We hope all the best for Rita and her family in the coming years.