NASA Postdoctoral Program: Heliophysics Science - Solar Wind Connections with Magnetized Plasmas and Gases

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 heliophysics research at Goddard Space Flight Center, studying solar wind connections with magnetized plasmas and gases. The research involves analyzing orbiting spacecraft observations complemented by sounding rockets, ground-based observations, and modeling to understand the ionization, heating, and flow of gases driven by solar wind electromagnetic and kinetic energy fluxes. Spacecraft data sets used include those from Wind, Polar, Geotail, Cluster, FAST, IMAGE, THEMIS, IBEX, and MMS. The research traces energy fluxes from regions producing reconnected magnetic fields into structured ionospheric flows and dissipation mechanisms, tracking resulting plasma outflows through global circulation. Opportunities exist to develop new instruments, analyze existing data sets, and conduct modeling experiments including Global Ion Kinetic simulations, single particle trajectory tracing, kinetic modeling, and multifluid magnetohydrodynamic models.