ICAR - Habitability Space: Exploring a New Frontier via Climate Models and Planetary Statistics

This is a NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) fellowship opportunity focused on astrobiology research. The 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 designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This specific research opportunity aims to define the 'habitability space' of observed rocky planets and possible icy moons in a rigorous and consistent manner, enabling the astrobiology community to predict with confidence which potential planetary targets are more likely to be habitable. The research uses recognized habitability parameters and climate cases from Solar System history and present-day icy moons to predict the likelihood that a given exoplanet or exomoon would be potentially habitable and observable. The approach combines a 3-D coupled land-ocean-atmosphere model (the ROCKE-3D GCM) with statistical methods that define populations of habitable planets. Research themes include comparative planetary climatology, deep ocean icy moon habitability, statistical sampling techniques, and synthetic spectra generation. The work involves building a public library of potentially habitable climate states guided by current understanding of planetary demographics, Earth's habitability through time, and the long-term evolution of Venus, Mars, and deep ocean worlds. The research will create synthetic spectra using NASA's Planetary Spectrum Generator and employ advanced statistical techniques to identify which potentially habitable worlds best match present exoplanet observations. The position is advised by Michael Way and requires doctoral-level expertise in astrobiology or related fields.