NASA Postdoctoral Program - High Fidelity Modeling of Heating during Entry to the Outer Planets

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 postdoctoral position focuses on examining entry probes entering the Saturn atmosphere, which are subject to convective and radiative heating by Hydrogen atoms, molecules and ions formed in the shock layer gases. The research involves reproducing radiative heating in H2 shockwaves using the NASA Ames Electric Arc Shock Tube (EAST) facility to test predictive models. The position will examine higher fidelity approaches that address thermal and chemical non-equilibrium and non-Boltzmann kinetics that may impact Hydrogen simulations. Modifications to calculation procedures will be merged into computational fluid dynamics and radiative codes in a tractable manner for future studies of entry systems. The successful applicant will work with the DPLR computational fluid dynamics code and the NEQAIR radiative solver to improve model fidelity and input parameters.