About this role
X Internal Research Fellow (PostDoc) in Space Environments and Effects Job Requisition ID: 20885 Date Posted: 9 September 2026 Closing Date: 7 October 2026 23:59 CET/CEST Publication: External Only Directorate: Technology, Engineering and Quality Workplace: Noordwijk, NL Location ESTEC, Noordwijk, Netherlands Our team and mission The Space Environments and Effects Section supports the development of ESA missions and programmes by investigating the space environments within which they will operate, assessing likely effects and defining mitigation methods. Environments addressed include high-energy radiation from radiation belts; solar particle events and cosmic rays; plasmas encountered in planetary magnetospheres; the solar wind and artificially generated charges and fields on spacecraft; micro-meteoroids and non trackable debris; planetary and lunar dust; and planetary atmospheres. The Section also initiates and manages a wide range of related modelling, software and hardware R&D activities. You are encouraged to visit the ESA website: https://www.esa.int / Field(s) of activity/research for the traineeship A significant number of ESA missions fly in severe radiation environments that can have various effects on the spacecraft and their payload and instrumentation. Such effects include dose degradation in components, displace damage in solar cells, different types of single event effects in electronics, imaging instrument interference, internal charging and biological effects on astronauts. Detailed analyses of such effects, and possible ways to shield and mitigate against them, are typically conducted by using environmental prediction in combination with Monte Carlo radiation simulation toolkits such as Geant4 and its application, GRAS (Geant4 Radiation Analysis for Space). ESA is a signatory member of the international Geant4 Collaboration together with CERN and a number of other institutes worldwide and has...