Washington ? NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe will resign this week, a government official said Sunday, and a spokesman for Louisiana State University said O’Keefe was a leading candidate to become a chancellor there.

The committee looking for someone to fill the $500,000-a-year job running the campus in Baton Rouge, La., meets Thursday, and O’Keefe will make his case for the job, search committee chairman Joel Tohline said.

O’Keefe has led the space agency for almost three years, a tumultuous period marred by the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its seven astronauts as well as budget battles and debates over the future of American space travel.

The administrator plans to resign this week, said the government official, who did not want to be identified because the procedures for O’Keefe’s departure still are not certain.

“The White House still has to decide how it wants to announce his departure,” the official said.

Despite O’Keefe’s appointment with the search committee on Thursday, the official said his resignation was not linked with an offer from LSU. The official said the resignation probably would come earlier than the scheduled meeting in Louisiana.

White House spokeswoman Suzy DeFrancis had no comment on O’Keefe’s future.

NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs said, “When the administrator is prepared to announce his future plans, he will tell us and the public.”

Another government official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the news of O’Keefe’s impending departure came as a shock at NASA.

LSU system president and acting chancellor William Jenkins “has had his eye on O’Keefe for quite some time,” Charles Zewe, spokesman for the university’s Board of Supervisors, said Sunday.

O’Keefe told the Melbourne, Fla., newspaper Florida Today, in a story published Saturday, that he was being considered for the LSU job.

Florida Today reported Sunday that a White House team is weighing five candidates and plans to announce O’Keefe’s departure by Thursday.