2024 – 2025

The EAI ACADEMY is an international educational program organised and broadcasted by the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB), CSIC-INTA, Madrid, with the support of the European Astrobiology Institute (EAI). It provides a framework to meet online with the international astrobiology community and to acquire interdisciplinary knowledge through a series of seminars given by experts in these fields. The Academy audience connects from more than 32 countries and all continents, with an average participation of 70 attendees per seminar. Past editions are accesible through the CAB youtube channel (link to 2021-2022, link to 2022-2023, link to 2023-2024).

The EAI Academy program for the academic year 2024-2025 will start this October. The seminars are offered for free and are streamed online via zoom every two weeks on Wednesday from 3:00 to 4:00 PM CET (Madrid time). The talks will be given by world-renowned experts, who answer the questions raised by the public after their talk. All seminars will be recorded for future availability in the CAB youtube channel.

At the end of the academic year, CAB awards a certificate of participation to those who attend a minimum of 10 seminars. In order for us to keep track of the attendance, you will need to enter your name and affiliation in the seminar chat when you enter the room (Zoom).

LIST OF SPEAKERS AND TOPICS

Dr Sara Seager

Professor of Physics, Professor of Planetary Science. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. October 2, 2024

Venus as Potentially Habitable Planet

For thousands of years, inspired by the star-filled dark night sky, people have wondered what lies beyond Earth. Today, the search for signs of life is a key motivator in modern-day planetary exploration. Scientists have been speculating on Venus as a habitable world for over half a century, not the scorching surface, but the much cooler atmosphere at 48 to 60 km above the surface. The concept is that Venus’ perpetual cloud cover might host life, as Earth’s clouds do. Many different decades-old Venusian atmosphere anomalies support this concept. The Venus clouds, however, are not made of water but are composed of concentrated sulfuric acid—an aggressive chemical that is toxic for Earth life. New lab-based experiments on the stability of nucleic acid bases, amino acids, and dipeptides in concentrated sulfuric acid advance the notion that the Venus atmosphere environment may be able to support complex chemicals needed for life and motivate the astrobiology-focused Morning Star Missions to Venus.

Dr Victoria Muñoz Iglesias

Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géosciences. University of Nantes October 16, 2024

Aqueous chemistry in ocean worlds

Ocean worlds are those planetary bodies that contain or have contained for a long period of time significant amounts of liquid water, either at the surface and/or in the subsurface. In our solar system, besides the Earth, both Ceres and the main icy moons of the outer solar system (OSS) show evidence of fulfilling or having fulfilled this condition. The maintenance of an ocean requires a constant energetic input over time to prevent solidification to ice. In those bodies with a predominantly rocky layer, such as the Earth and to a lesser extent Ceres, this input comes from radioactive decay, in addition to the primordial heat after its formation. However, in the icy moons of the OSS, farther from the Sun, this input comes from the strong tidal forces produced during their orbit around their larger parent planets, i.e., the gas or icy giants. This energetic input also favors other substances (such as gases, salts, and silicates), to be released from the more rocky layers (usually located below the hydrospheres or partially intermixed) and interact with the water molecules. In this talk my intention is to show the aqueous chemistry, and the geological implications, that can take place on the ocean worlds of the OSS. I will show how water chemistry evolves from the interior to the surface due to pressure and temperature changes. The evolution of cryomagmas, according to their initial composition and depending on what they encounter on their way, will give rise to various chemical reactions and precipitation of different minerals. Moreover, when they reach the surface, the radical environmental change causes the cryomagmas to continue to modify themselves chemically and physically. Experimental study and geochemical and geophysical modeling of the various processes that cryomagmas can follow from the interior to the surface serve to infer the interior composition from data taken at the surface during space missions to these planetary bodies.

Dr. Inge Loes ten Kate

Utrecht University
20.11.24

Mars biosignatures: how do we search, where do we search, and what are we searching for

The concept of a biosignature is used to suggest a link between an observation and a biological cause of this observation. To convincingly state that we have detected a biosignature, we need to understand very well the context and environment where we are searching and the potential abiotic causes of the signature. Our long history of Mars exploration has led to a wealth of knowledge that allows us to make well-supported landing site selections in our search for biosignatures. In this talk I will focus on the three aspects related to biosignature detection on Mars: how do we search, where do we search and what are we searching for. With this talk I will sketch the broader context of the search for biosignatures on Mars.

Dr. Melissa McClure

University of Leiden Netherlands
27.11.24

How JWST traces life's cold, icy origins

Volatile elements, like C, H, O, N, and S, are critical to the formation of molecular life on our world and others outside our own solar system. Some of these elements on Earth, e.g. in H2O, appear to have originated as ices in the dense molecular clouds from which stars are born. However, other ices, like CO, may be destroyed during the star and planet formation process. The survival of different simple ices has profound implications for the formation and survival of more complex organic molecules (COMs), which include chemical precursors to bio-molecules that may be important for the formation of life. Complex molecules are abundantly detected in the gas phase of comets, protostars, and molecular clouds, in ratios suggesting a shared origin for these in the densest, coldest molecular clouds from which stars are born. If ices become complex at this stage, then it could jumpstart the formation of life on other planets, as each of the hundreds of star systems that form from these clouds would carry reasonably complex ices in its small rocky bodies, like comets. Several formation pathways for complex ices start in 10 K, CO-rich ices in these cores. However, until recently no COMs more complex than methanol (a simple alcohol) have been detected in astrophysical ices, due to the sensitivity and resolution limitations of previous infrared facilities. The successfully launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revolutionized our ability to trace the chemistry of the elemental building blocks of life (CHONS) as they build up to more complex species. Combining these novel astrophysical observations with experimental, ground-based laboratory spectroscopy, along with innovative astrochemical modeling, gives us the ability to address this complicated question for the first time. I will describe how exciting new results from several Cycle 1 JWST programs are beginning to shed light on whether the origins of life could be universal, and what we should look out for in the years to come.

Dr. Peter M. Higgins

Harvard University
11.12.24

Outer Solar System Bodies: Exploration and Complex Chemistry

Tucked away beneath their icy crusts, moons orbiting the giant planets have subsurface water oceans that could potentially support Earth-like life. Understanding their habitability has now become a central objective for current and future space missions. But what exactly does "habitability" mean, and how can we evaluate it using data from orbiting spacecraft that cannot directly access these hidden oceans? In this seminar, we will demystify the concept of habitability and explore how it is assessed. We will break life's fundamental requirements down into a suite of key physical, geological, and chemical controls. Then, we will discuss how equipment aboard past, present, and future spacecraft help piece together these clues for evaluating habitability, even when the proposed habitats are hidden many kilometres below the surface.

Dr. Zita Martins

University of Lisboa Portugal
15.01.25

Outer solar system bodies: exploration and complex chemistry

Dr. Peter Woitke

Space Research Institute (Institut fuer Weltraumforschung, IWF) Austria
29.01.25

James Webb Space Telescope: first results

Dr. Fabian Klenner

University of Washington USA
12.02.25

Outer solar system bodies: exploration and complex chemistry

Dr. Mickael Baqué

German Aerospace Center (DLR) Germany
26.02.25

Planetary analogs: field work in extreme environments on Earth to test for habitability and biosignature detection

Dr. Eddie Schwieterman

University of California at Riverside USA
12.03.25

Exoplanet Frontiers: The Search for Habitable and Inhabited Worlds

Dr. Ben Tatton

Open University UK
26.03.25

Anaerobic Life: Through Time and Across the Solar System

Dr. Nikku Madhusudhan

University of Cambridge UK
09.04.25

JWST: First results and prospects towards the search for life on exoplanets

Dr. Dominic Papineau

University College London UK 23.04.25

Anaerobic Life

Dr. María-Paz Zorzano

CAB Spain
07.05.25

Martian biomarkers and robotic missions, as seen by Curiosity, Perseverance and the Mars Sample Return mission.

Dr. Matthew Dodd

University of Western Australia Australia 21.05.25

Anaerobic Life

Dr. Yohey Suzuki

University of Tokyo Japan 04.06.25

Anaerobic Life