Related papers: Geoscience for understanding habitability in the s…
Earth will become uninhabitable within 2-3 Gyr as a result of the moving boundaries of the habitable zone caused by the increasing luminosity of the Sun. Predictions about the future of habitable conditions on Earth include a decline in…
Mars exploration motivates the search for extraterrestrial life, the development of space technologies, and the design of human missions and habitations. Here we seek new insights and pose unresolved questions relating to the natural…
Water and land surfaces on a planet interact with gases in the atmosphere and with radiation from the star. These interactions define the environments that prevail on the planet, some of which may be more amenable to prebiotic chemistry,…
Understanding the formation and dynamical evolution of habitable planets in extrasolar planetary systems is a challenging task. In this respect, systems with multiple giant planets and/or multiple stars present special complications. The…
Patterns in a semiarid ecosystem are important because they directly and indirectly affect ecological processes, biodiversity, and ecosystem resilience. Understanding the causes and effects of these patterns is critical for long-term land…
Astronomical surveys have identified numerous exoplanets with bulk compositions that are unlike the planets of the Solar System, including rocky super-Earths and gas-enveloped sub-Neptunes. Observing the atmospheres of these objects…
We explore if carbon-based macromolecules (such as DNA) in the environments of stars other than the Sun are able to survive the effects of photospheric stellar radiation, such as UV-C. Therefore, we focus on main-sequence stars of spectral…
The habitable zone is the main tool that mission architectures utilize to select potentially habitable planets for follow up spectroscopic observation. Given its importance, the precise size and location of the habitable zone remains a hot…
Cycling of carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and interior of rocky planets can stabilize global climate and enable planetary surface temperatures above freezing over geologic time. However, variations in global carbon budget and…
The key goals of the astrobiology community are to identify environments beyond Earth that may be habitable, and to search for signs of life in those environments. A fundamental aspect of understanding the limits of habitable environments…
Earth's tectonic processes regulate the formation of continental crust, control its unique deep water and carbon cycles, and are vital to its surface habitability. A major driver of steady-state plate tectonics on Earth is the sinking of…
We model the evolution of planets with various masses and compositions. We investigate the effects of the composition and its depth dependence on the long-term evolution of the planets. The effects of opacity and stellar irradiation are…
Interactions between the winds of stars and the magnetospheres and atmospheres of planets involve many processes, including the acceleration of particles, heating of upper atmospheres, and a diverse range of atmospheric loss processes.…
Our planet is experiencing an accelerated process of change associated to a variety of anthropogenic phenomena. The future of this transformation is uncertain, but there is general agreement about its negative unfolding that might threaten…
Plate tectonics is a fundamental component for the habitability of the Earth. Yet whether it is a recurrent feature of terrestrial bodies orbiting other stars or unique to the Earth is unknown. The stagnant lid may rather be the most common…
This chapter of the Planetary Exploration Horizon 2061 Report reviews the way the six key questions about planetary systems, from their origins to the way they work and their habitability, identified in chapter 1, can be addressed by means…
Aims: The long-term carbon cycle for planets with a surface entirely covered by oceans works differently from that of the present-day Earth because inefficient erosion leads to a strong dependence of the weathering rate on the rate of…
From analytical studies of tidal heating, eclipses and planetary illumination, it is clear that the exomoon habitable zone (EHZ) - the set of moon and host planet orbits that permit liquid water on an Earthlike moon's surface - is a…
The search of life in the Universe is a fundamental problem of astrobiology and a major priority for NASA. A key area of major progress since the NASA Astrobiology Strategy 2015 (NAS15) has been a shift from the exoplanet discovery phase to…
The architecture of exoplanetary systems is often different from the solar system, with some exoplanets being in close orbits around their host stars and having orbital periods of only a few days. In analogy to interactions between stars in…