Heliophysics Science: Global Magnetospheric Simulation

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 developing the next generation of global simulations of the terrestrial magnetosphere and on intercalibrating existing simulation codes against themselves, data-based global models, and against direct spacecraft observations. Current research emphasizes world-class capabilities in magnetosphere modeling with the long-range objective of developing global magnetosphere simulations that allow for a quantitatively correct description of the terrestrial magnetosphere system. The principal new techniques in global magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) code development include the construction of a finite element, a fully adaptive grid global MHD magnetospheric code, and the use of hybrid and kinetic code patches to regions of the global MHD code where MHD is not applicable. This fellowship is located at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.