Summer 2025 Intern – Software Development and GPU Acceleration for the Porous Microstructure Analysis (PuMA) Software

AMA is seeking a motivated and detail-oriented Entry Systems Modeling summer 2025 intern to join our team in Moffett Field, CA supporting NASA on the Aircraft Systems and Spaceflight Engineering Support Services (ASSESS) contract at NASA Ames Research Center (ARC). Work will be in support of the Thermal Protection Materials branch, part of the Entry Systems and Technology Division at NASA ARC. The successful candidate will work, on-site, on a short term (10 weeks; from June 2nd until August 8th, 2025) modeling project in a research topic of relevance to the Entry Systems Modeling project.

In particular, this internship will be supporting the materials modeling technical area. The goal for this technical area is to develop and validate a high-fidelity modeling capability to better understand how heat shield materials physically and chemically deteriorate while traveling through an atmosphere. This helps to reduce uncertainty when designing thermal protection systems for future missions. The internship project will contribute to the development of numerical methods and GPU acceleration techniques for the Porous Microstructure Analysis (PuMA) software, a NASA open-source materials modeling tool developed under the ESM project. PuMA is a computational framework designed for simulating and analyzing the microstructure of porous thermal protection materials. It is used to calculate effective material properties such as permeability, thermal conductivity, and mechanical strength using high-resolution 3D datasets obtained from X-ray micro-tomography.