Could any material from the asteroid strike 66 million years ago have
reached the Moon or Mars?
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Duncan Cairncross
Retired EngineerDec 19

Could any material from the asteroid strike 66 million years ago have
reached the Moon or Mars?

The Dino Killer was about 200 cubic kilometers of material - its certain
that some of that huge volume of material - and some of the earths crust
- was splashed at over the earths escape velocity and blown into space

Its almost certain that some of that 1,000,000,000,000,000 kg of rock
will have reached both the moon and Mars
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Alan Appleby
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Studied Environmental Science & Educational Research Methods at
Life-long Learning Throughout a Long Teaching CareerDec 25
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Could any material from the asteroid strike 66 million years ago have
reached the Moon or Mars?
Quite lot probably reached the Moon.

Some could have landed on Mars or even gone a lot further out in the
Solar System.

Some astronomers did calculation to work out just where it could have
gone, depending on the force of the impact.

Alan Appleby
· 3y
Scientists believe that the KT extinction event ejected a great volume
of debris from Earth which spread throughout the solar system. Are there
any lifeforms on Earth that could survive such a journey to Mars or the
moons of Jupiter or Saturn?
Scientists believe that the KT extinction event ejected a great volume
of debris from Earth which spread throughout the solar system. Are there
any lifeforms on Earth that could survive such a journey to Mars or the
moons of Jupiter or Saturn? There are various species which have been
shown to be able to survive in the vacuum of space. There was also a
study done which showed where debris from and asteroid impact on earth
would be likely to go in the Solar-System. Earth Ejecta Could Have
Seeded Life on Europa Earth Ejecta Could Have Seeded Life on Europa
Life-carrying rocks ejected from Earth by asteroid impacts could have
made their way to Jupiter and beyond, say astronomers This raises an
interesting question: how much Earth ejecta could have ended up
elsewhere in the Solar System? Various astronomers have studied this
question by simulating how far test particles can travel after being
ejected from Earth. Their conclusion is that it’s relatively easy for
bits of Earth to end up on the Moon or Venus. But very little would get
to Mars because it would have to overcome both the Sun and the Earth’s
gravity. Today, Mauricio Reyes-Ruiz at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma
de Mexico and a few pals reveal the results of the biggest simulation of
Earth ejecta ever undertaken. And they have a surprise. These guys have
created a computer model in which 10,242 test particles are ejected from
Earth into the Solar System. They’ve run the model five times,
increasing the average velocity of the ejected particles each time.What
they’ve found is quite a surprise. First up, the number of particle that
end up on Mars is two orders of magnitude greater than previous studies
have found. But the biggie is that, at higher ejection speeds, particles
are much more likely to end up hitting Jupiter than Mars. That could
have significant implications for the possibility that life on Earth
could have travelled elsewhere. In these simulations, the Mexican team
followed the test particles for up to 30,000 years, which is the length
of time that astrobiologists believe Earth’s hardiest lifeforms might
survive in space. ESA and NASA have also done experiments, exposing
Earth organisms to the vacuum of space when working from satellites,
space shuttles or from the ISS. Tiny animals survive exposure to space
The tardigrades join a fairly select group of organisms which are able
to cope with the extreme conditions in space. Over the past 10 years,
other ESA experiments have shown that lettuce seeds and lichen were also
able to survive exposure to space. If shaded from direct sunlight,
bacterial spores are also known to survive for many years under space
conditions. Alan Appleby's answer to What are the odds that if life is
discovered on Mars, that the discovered microbes would have originated
on Earth and were deposited there by asteroid or comet impact ejecta?
Water bears, also known as tardigrades, are very small, segmented
animals. The largest species is just over one millimetre in length. They
are known to survive under conditions that would kill most organisms –
they can withstand temperatures ranging from -272 deg C to +150 deg C,
they can be without water for a period of 10 years, and they are
extremely resistant to radiation.
Alan Appleby's answer to Are we certain that living organisms exist on
other planets? Alan Appleby's answer to Is life in solar system outside
Earth likely to look a lot like animals and humans since life must start
with DNA? Alan Appleby's answer to Why did no small dinosaurs survive
the asteroid impact like small mammals? Alan Appleby's answer to Has a
‘fossilized killing field’ created the exact day the dinosaurs died been
discovered?
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