NASA Postdoctoral Program Opportunities

• U.S. Citizens Accepted
• Lawful Permanent Residents Accepted
• Foreign Nationals Accepted - Applications with citizens from Designated Countries will not be accepted at this time, unless they are Legal Permanent Residents of the United States. A complete list of Designated Countries can be found at: http://oiir.hq.nasa.gov/nasaecp/.

Planetary habitability depends on the planet's own properties, especially mass and composition, the stellar radiation that it receives (which is determined by its star's luminosity and the planet's orbit), and the distribution of other planets and smaller bodies in the system, which determines the frequency of major impacts such as the one that killed off dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Dynamical models of planetary formation are being developed to estimate the abundance of habitable planets in our galaxy. Some of the key questions being addressed include can habitable planets form in binary star systems? How do Jupiter-like planets form and is their presence in a system required for smaller planets to be habitable? How are volatiles such as water and carbon compounds delivered to rocky planets like Earth? These questions are especially timely because NASA's Kepler spacecraft has returned data that is revolutionizing our knowledge of extrasolar planets.