NASA Postdoctoral Program - Modeling structure of active galactic nuclei for improvement of space geodesy results

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 developing methods of data analysis for Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) to mitigate systematic errors caused by extended source structure in active galactic nuclei. The research aims to improve the accuracy of space geodesy results, including terrestrial coordinate systems, celestial coordinate systems, and Earth orientation parameters. The work sits at the junction of astrophysics and Earth science, utilizing NASA's dataset of over 100,000 radio images of radio sources to investigate methods for mitigating source structure contribution. The opportunity is closed to Senior Fellows (5-years or more past PhD).