Solar System Exploration: Solar Wind Interaction with Weakly Magnetized Bodies

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 solar wind interacts with weakly or nonmagnetized bodies in a variety of manners: (1) flow diversion resulting from mass loading caused by charge exchange and photo-ionization of their upper atmospheres, (2) direct interactions with ionospheric plasma, and (3) crustal absorption where both an intrinsic magnetic field and a neural atmosphere are lacking. These processes give rise to such phenomena as bow and limb shocks, pickup ion acceleration, the growth of various wave modes in the mass loaded solar wind, cometary ray structures, ionosheath plasma depletion layers, drift mirror waves, ionopause current layers, ionospheric fluxropes, nightside ionospheric holes, cometary type-I ion tails, induced magnetic tails, and plasma wake effects. Extensive data sets relevant to these phenomena from previous missions such as Pioneer Venus, International Cometary Explorer, Giotto, and Phobos-2 are available at LEP, two new data sets from Mars Global Surveyor and Lunar Prospector. Research opportunities exist for a range of data analysis and theoretical modeling topics related to all of these missions.

Location

Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland

Field of Science

Planetary Science

Advisors

• Mei-Ching Fok
  mei-ching.h.fok@nasa.gov
  301-286-1083
• Alex Glocer
  alex.glocer-1@nasa.gov
  301-286-9475
• Edward Sittler
  Edward.C.Sittler@nasa.gov
  301-286-9215

Eligibility

• U.S. Citizens;
• U.S. Lawful Permanent Residents (LPR);
• Foreign Nationals eligible for an Exchange Visitor J-1 visa status;
• Applicants for LPR, asylees, or refugees in the U.S. at the time of application with 1) a valid EAD card and 2) I-485 or I-589 forms in pending status

Questions

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