James Webb Space Telescope finds carbon dioxide on Jupiter’s moon Europa

The James Webb Space Telescope has found evidence of carbon dioxide on Jupiter's moon Europa, which has long been considered to be a potential host for extraterrestrial life.

An image of Jupiter's moon Europa made using pictures taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute)

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The James Webb Space Telescope has helped make yet another significant discovery—astronomers have identified carbon dioxide in a region on the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa using data from the telescope.

Carbon is an essential component for life as we know it. This means that the latest Webb discovery could be an important step in the search for life. The researchers’ analysis indicates that the carbon they detected likely originated in an ocean beneath Europa’s surface and not from external sources like meteorites, according to the European Space Agency.

Two studies published in the journal Science indicate that carbon dioxide is most abundant in a region called Tara Regio on Europa. The area is young in geological terms and consists of resurfaced terrain called “chaos terrain.” Here, the surface ice has been disrupted, and there was probably an exchange of material between the subsurface ocean and the icy surface.

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According to Samantha Trumbo, lead author of the second paper that analysed the data, previous observations made using the Hubble telescope have shown evidence for ocean-derived salt in Tara Regio. Now that the presence of carbon dioxide is established there, this could imply that it came from the internal ocean.

Europa has long been thought of as a potential location that hosts extraterrestrial life in our solar system. In fact, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is considering a mission that will send a swarm of cellphone-size robots that could swim in the water beneath the kilometres-thick icy shell of Jupiter’s moon Europa, looking for alien life.

But that “cryobot” mission is probably very far away, assuming that it ever turns into reality.

The American space agency’s Europa Clipper mission, however, is scheduled for launch in 2024. The mission will conduct multiple flybys of Europa to gather detailed data with a large suite of instruments when it arrives there in 2030. The discovery of carbon dioxide on Jupiter’s moon could change the parameters of Clipper and other missions.

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James Webb Space Telescope