NASA Postdoctoral Program - Astrophysics: Cosmic Microwave Background and Diffuse Galactic Emission

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 is located in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at Goddard Space Flight Center, which has several active projects to measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and diffuse Galactic and extragalactic emission at decimeter through sub-millimeter wavelengths. These include development of suborbital balloon payloads (PIPER, EXCLAIM, Dust Buster), mission concept development for future space missions (PIXIE, Phoenix, PICO), and analysis of archival data to model Galactic emission from synchrotron, dust, and anomalous microwave emission. Research opportunities exist for development of flight hardware, analysis of archival data, and the analysis and design of future missions at decimeter to far-IR wavelengths. Scientific goals include measurements of CMB polarization to search for evidence of an inflationary epoch in the early universe, measurements of distortions from the CMB blackbody spectrum to determine the energy budget of the universe, measurements of far-IR emission lines to determine the star formation history of the universe, measurements of polarized emission from interstellar dust to determine its composition and emission mechanisms, and models of diffuse synchrotron emission to determine the origin of the observed radio synchrotron background.