Recently in the Panspermia Category
Transfer of Life by Earth-Grazing Objects to Exoplanetary Systems
Recently, a 30 cm object was discovered to graze the Earth's atmosphere and shift into a Jupiter-crossing orbit. We use the related survey parameters to calibrate the total number of such objects.
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Exporting Terrestrial Life Out of the Solar System with Gravitational Slingshots of Earthgrazing Bodies
Exporting terrestrial life out of the Solar System requires a process that both embeds microbes in boulders and ejects those boulders out of the Solar System.
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Microbial Contamination: Sample Return from Mars Moons: Departure of Microbes From Mars' Surface
Potential microbial contamination of Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos, which can be brought about by transportation of Mars ejecta produced by meteoroid impacts on the Martian surface, has been comprehensively assessed in a statistical approach, based on the most probable history of recent major gigantic meteoroid collisions on the Martian surface.
Continue reading Microbial Contamination: Sample Return from Mars Moons: Departure of Microbes From Mars' Surface.
Planet Seeding And Panspermia
The first detection of an interstellar asteroid/comet-like object visiting the solar system two years ago has sparked the ideas about the possibility of interstellar travel.
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Planting Earth Life on Habitable but Sterile M-dwarf Oxygen Planets
Time is arguably the key limiting factor for interstellar exploration. At high speeds, flyby missions to nearby stars by laser propelled wafersats taking 50-100 years would be feasible.
Continue reading Planting Earth Life on Habitable but Sterile M-dwarf Oxygen Planets.
Galactic Panspermia
We present an analytic model to estimate the total number of rocky or icy objects that could be captured by planetary systems within the Milky Way galaxy and result in panspermia should they harbor life. We estimate the capture rate of objects ejected from planetary systems over the entire phase space as well as time.
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Dynamical and Biological Panspermia Constraints Within Multi-planet Exosystems
As discoveries of multiple planets in the habitable zone of their parent star mount, developing analytical techniques to quantify extrasolar intra-system panspermia will become increasingly important.
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Implications of Captured Interstellar Objects for Panspermia and Extraterrestrial Life
We estimate the capture rate of interstellar objects by means of three-body gravitational interactions. We apply this model to the Sun-Jupiter system and the Alpha Centauri A\B binary system, and find that the radius of the largest captured object is a few tens of km and Earth-sized respectively.
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Fast Litho-panspermia in the Habitable Zone of the TRAPPIST-1 System
With several short-period, Earth-mass planets in the habitable zone, the TRAPPIST-1 system potentially allows litho-panspermia to take place on very short timescales. We investigate the efficiency and speed of inter-planetary material transfer resulting from impacts onto the habitable zone planets.
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Enhanced Interplanetary Panspermia In The TRAPPIST-1 System
We present a simple model for estimating the probability of interplanetary panspermia in the recently discovered system of seven planets orbiting the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, and find that panspermia is potentially orders of magnitude more likely to occur in the TRAPPIST-1 system compared to the Earth-to-Mars case.
Continue reading Enhanced Interplanetary Panspermia In The TRAPPIST-1 System.
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