NASA Postdoctoral Program - Astrophysics: Instrumentation for High-Contrast Imaging

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 the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), which will seek to directly image and characterize Earth-like exoplanets orbiting nearby Sun-like stars. This requires optical instrumentation capable of suppressing starlight by up to ten orders of magnitude at visible wavelengths. The research involves developing a range of direct imaging technologies relevant to HWO, including coronagraphs, deformable mirrors, integral field spectroscopy, photon-counting detectors, wavefront sensing and control, and image post-processing algorithms. The team has created the Exoplanet Spectroscopy Technologies (ExoSpec) in-air testbed to carry out system-level demonstrations using these technologies. The fellowship is located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.