Asteroid Threat Assessment

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects. This specific opportunity focuses on understanding the potential threat to earth due to asteroid impact, which is an interdisciplinary pursuit requiring studying the population of near earth asteroids and their properties, atmospheric entry behavior, and damage assessment from airbursts, ground impacts and tsunamis. Research areas include observational studies of near earth asteroids, modeling thermal emission, atmospheric entry experiments and models, fragmentation during entry, aerothermodynamics, impact hazard research, and risk modeling. The fellowship provides opportunities to participate in all areas of asteroid threat assessment including planetary science, atmospheric entry physics, impact hazard analysis, and probabilistic risk modeling. Research involves creating reduced order models based on detailed simulations that can run efficiently in Monte Carlo frameworks, and incorporating mitigation options into probabilistic asteroid impact risk models.