Geophysical Investigations of Habitability in Icy Ocean Worlds

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This specific opportunity focuses on geophysical measurements that reveal the structures and thermal states of icy ocean worlds. The research involves forward modeling results relating geophysics to habitability, which is essential to NASA's objective of understanding planetary bodies and the nature of life. Such predictions are needed for planning observations and data synthesis for future missions such as Europa Clipper, which has the express goal of investigating Europa to understand its habitability. The program seeks diverse expertise in applied theoretical and experimental aqueous chemistry, solid earth geophysics or geochemistry, and programming in Python and MATLAB. The preferred candidate would demonstrate a commitment to open source (FAIR) practices and knowledge of tools such as GitHub and Sphinx.