NASA Postdoctoral Program - ICAR - Retention of Habitable Atmospheres in Planetary Systems

The NASA Postdoctoral Program 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 Retention of Habitable Atmospheres in Planetary Systems (RHAPS) team's work to understand how the properties of a planet and its host star influence its ability to retain an atmosphere. The research brings together modelers and observers who study Earth, solar system planets, and exoplanets to model atmospheric escape via all known escape processes for a variety of star-planet scenarios. The effort consists of four main tasks: computing stellar inputs for planetary escape, improving and linking models for atmospheric escape, constructing a multi-dimensional model library, and applying the model library to understand the connection between atmospheric escape, habitability, and observations. Major results will include 150-200 complete sets of input conditions, a web interface to all model results, escape rates from competing models, estimates of atmospheric lifetimes for each scenario, and predictions for exoplanet transit observations.