EXO−ATMOS: A scalable grid of hypothetical planetary atmospheres

Abstract

As part of the NASA Frontier Development Lab, we implemented a parallelized cloud-based exploration strategy to better understand the statistical distributions and properties of potential planetary atmospheres. Starting with a modern-day Earth atmosphere, we iteratively and incrementally simulated a range of atmospheres to infer the landscape of the multi-parameter space, such as the abundances of biological mediated gases that would yield stable (non-runaway) planetary atmospheres on Earth-like planets around solar-type stars. Our current dataset comprises of 124,314 simulated models of earth-like exoplanet atmospheres and is available publicly on the NASA Exoplanet Archive. Our scalable approach of analysing atmospheres could also help interpret future observations of planetary atmospheres by providing estimates of atmospheric gas fluxes and temperatures as a function of altitude, and thereby enable high-throughput first-order assessment of the potential habitability of exoplanetary surfaces.