Salary: Grade 7 ranging from £28,839 - £35,469 per annum depending on experience

Start date: 1 July 2009 or as soon as possible thereafter.

Location: Holmbury St. Mary, Dorking, UK.

The post is funded for 13 months.

UCL/MSSL has a vacancy for a post-doctoral scientist funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (formerly PPARC) to join Prof. Jan-Peter Muller's Imaging Group who are actively engaged in the development of new mapping techniques and their scientific application for the surfaces of Mars, the Moon and the Earth. For Mars, data has been primarily from the instruments onboard the ESA Mars Express (MeX).

More recently data from the NASA Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter Context Camera (CTX) and HiRise camera are being employed together with sub-surface sound radar from the NASA-ASI SHARAD and MARSIS instruments.

The successful applicant will be engaged in building regional scale Digital Terrain Models of outflow channels on Mars, primarily using stereo imagery from the HRSC (High Resolution Stereo Camera) instrument onboard MeX using bundle block adjusted orbits on a stereo workstation. This work is being carried out in association with Dr Sanjeev Gupta and Dr Nick Warner (Imperial College Earth Science and Engineering) who have expertise in planetary surface processes, Jeremy Morley (Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, UCL) who has expertise in Web-GIS, and Dr Neil McIntyre (Imperial College Civil Engineering) who has expertise in hydrology. In addition, the applicant would be expected to collaborate with other members of the group on automated geomorphometric mapping (e.g. crater detection) as well as develop their own research themes within the context of the group's interests in planetary surface exploration from the ESA ExoMars stereo Panoramic Camera (PanCam). The DTM and other products will be made available after production in a web-enabled form. The candidate should have a Ph.D in a geomatics or machine vision discipline, preferably related to DTM creation from stereo photogrammetric data. Experience with handling stereo spaceborne data is desirable.

MSSL is a multi-disciplinary laboratory, with a long track record in the design, build, operation and exploitation of space and astrophysics instrumentation. MSSL was selected by ESA and STFC under Dr Andrew Coates' leadership to design and build the stereo PanCam system. The successful applicant will have the opportunity to participate in scientific studies leading to prospective MSSL involvement in future spaceflight missions.

Further information about MSSL in general can be found at http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk.

The job description and person specification, can be found at http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/jobs

Applicants should provide a CV, the names and email addresses of 3 professional referees, an up-to-date publication list, a brief description of their research experience and a summary of their future research aspirations. Please also provide details requested at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hr/docs/download_forms/recruitment_selection_I.doc (InformationSheet and Equal Opportunities Information). These documents should be sent to (ead@mssl.ucl.ac.uk) by 21^st June 2009.