Big Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence in the Era of Large Astronomical Surveys

About the role

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.

Description

The 2010 Decadal Survey; New Worlds, New Horizons in Astronomy and Astrophysics (National Research Council, 2010), prescribed the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) as its highest ranked large space project for the decade. WFIRST, conceived as a filled aperture, wide field, near infrared flagship-class observatory, was proposed to settle fundamental questions about the nature of dark energy and to complete the census of all possible types of exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy using wide-field imaging onto a very large, dense detector array. To accomplish this, the mission will accumulate 256 trillion pixel images at a rate of one every 15 minutes for analysis.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), launched in early Spring of 2019, is conducting wide-field imaging of nearly the entire celestial sphere in search of exoplanets that eclipse their host star. Tiling the sky over a period of 2 years using four large detector arrays, TESS will recover about 2.5 million photometric lightcurves for each of its 26 sectors before moving on to a survey of the Galactic plane. The community, using a crude box-least squares method, is searching this vast trove for the faint signature of exoplanets - simply discarding other sources of stellar variability as noise.

These two missions and others under consideration have one thing in common – very large, very complex data sets replete with observatory systematics and elusive, tenuous astrophysical signals. Recognizing the significant challenge this raises for the science return of TESS, WFIRST and future survey missions, NASA seeks a post doctoral fellow with the necessary data science skills to formulate a systematic approach to extraction of science in the face of extremely high data rates or in large complex archives.

Examples of areas of interest

• Data science
• Computer science
• Statistics
• Machine learning
• Artificial intelligence
• Database design

Location

Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland

Field of Science

Interdisciplinary/Other

Advisors

Richard Barry
richard.k.barry@nasa.gov
301-286-1753

Eligibility

Candidates need not have a strong background in astronomy or physics to apply. Candidates must have experience or training in one or more of the following skill sets in the service of, or scalable to very large data archives or high data accumulation rates:

• Data science
• Computer science
• Statistics
• Machine learning
• Artificial intelligence
• Database design

Questions

Please email npp@orau.org for questions about this opportunity.