NASA Postdoctoral Program - Isotopic Characterization of Presolar Grains to Discern their Origins and Histories

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 presolar grains research at Johnson Space Center, involving multi-element isotopic analysis of presolar grains found in primitive meteorites and interplanetary dust particles using the NanoSIMS 50L instrument. The research aims to understand stellar and galactic chemical evolution, nucleosynthetic and mixing processes, and dust condensation processes in stellar atmospheres. Presolar grains are pieces of stardust that condensed in the outflows of evolved stars, supernovae, and novae, retaining highly anomalous isotopic compositions of their parent stars, and understanding their origins and histories is intimately linked with understanding the origin of the Solar System.