Determining Main Belt and NEO Origins and Increasing Reliability of Asteroid Detections

About the role

The project aims to understand the distribution of size, albedo, and orbital elements of the smaller (sub-kilometer) Main Belt Asteroids, as this is the source region of potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroid population.

Responsibilities

• Build from the prior studies, based on the full surveyed populations of those missions, more comprehensive knowledge of instrument and observation properties of the WISE/NEOWISE missions, improved thermal modeling, and other techniques.
• Generate a more comprehensive summary of the MBA population as well as useful information about the targets of the Near-Earth Objects Surveyor (NEOS) mission, which will launch in late 2027, feeding into reliability analyses for its asteroid detections.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience studying asteroid or other small body populations, including thermal modeling of small bodies.
• Acquiring, processing, and analyzing WISE/NEOWISE observations.
• Related presentation/publication record.
• Robust familiarity with the NEOS mission and its planned observations.

Skills

• Thermal modeling of small bodies.
• Acquiring, processing, and analyzing WISE/NEOWISE observations.
• Understanding of the NEOS mission and its planned observations.

Benefits

• Unique research opportunities at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute.
• Competitive one- to three-year fellowships designed to advance NASA’s missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology.

Pay

N/A

Schedule

N/A

Benefits

N/A

Contact Information

Point of Contact: Mikeala

Email: npp@orau.org

Phone: (626) 720-7293