NASA Postdoctoral Program - Solar System Exploration: Solar Wind Interaction with Weakly Magnetized Bodies

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 research related to how the solar wind interacts with weakly or nonmagnetized bodies through various mechanisms including flow diversion from mass loading, direct interactions with ionospheric plasma, and crustal absorption. The research encompasses phenomena such as bow and limb shocks, pickup ion acceleration, wave mode growth, cometary ray structures, ionopause current layers, and plasma wake effects. Extensive data sets from missions including Pioneer Venus, International Cometary Explorer, Giotto, Phobos-2, Mars Global Surveyor, and Lunar Prospector are available for analysis. Research opportunities exist for data analysis and theoretical modeling topics related to these missions at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.