James Webb Telescope detects carbon dioxide on surface of Pluto's largest moon

Data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveal traces of carbon dioxide and hydrogen peroxide on the surface of Pluto's largest moon.

Transcript

00:00We were expecting to see carbon dioxide, it's ubiquitous about the carbons everywhere in

00:17the solar system, so it's perhaps not surprising to see it there, but the type, you know, where

00:21it is, the type it is, how it's structured, just give us a better understanding of the

00:25moon itself.

00:27Carbon peroxide is something you only get from radiolysis of water, we know that there's

00:30water there, so again, perhaps not particularly surprising that it's there, but by detecting

00:35the levels we can see we have a constraint on how much radiation's been hitting Charon

00:40perhaps, which radiation's important in Charon's processing, so it sort of points to how it's

00:46evolved.

00:57In 2022 and 2023 we used the near-infrared spectrograph on JWST to conduct four observations

01:07of Charon to ensure full coverage of its northern hemisphere, and like previous observations

01:14which were limited up to 2.5 microns, this new data enabled to extend the wavelength's

01:21coverage up to 5 micron.