Millimeter-wave Imaging of the Pluto-Charon System

Abstract

We present further analysis of all high-resolution observations of the Pluto/Charon system obtained with the Submillimeter Array in order to determine best values of the mean millimeter-band brightness temperatures of each object. The best imaging is still obtained from our May 2005 observations, which find mean brightness temperatures of 37±2 K for Pluto and 49±8 K for Charon. Observations in 2009 were significantly degraded due to weather. Observations in 2010 were of high quality but provide unrealistically low temperatures, and were likely negatively impacted by the presence of background emission near the galactic plane. We will discuss possible methods for retrieving better values from the 2010 observations using WMAP and Planck results. We will also discuss limits on the CO abundance of the atmosphere obtained from a subset of the data.