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