SIMULTANEOUS SPATIALLY-RESOLVED NEAR-INFRARED SPECTRA OF PLUTO AND CHARON.

Introduction: We present near-infrared spectra 0.8 – 2.5 μm of Pluto (Fig. 1) and its satellite Charon (Fig. 2) obtained with the CorMASS [1] spectrometer while it was a visiting instrument at the 6.5-m Magellan telescope at Las Campanas, Chile in May 2005. Normally a difficult observation without adaptive optics, Pluto and Charon were spatially resolved in the CorMASS slit because they were near maximum elongation in their orbit (0.7”) and Magellan had excellent seeing (0.4'') at the time of data acquisition. Although the resolution (R = λ/Δλ) of these spectra (R ~ 300) does not exceed that of previously obtained spectra [24], the wavelength range covers the rarely observed region 0.8 – 1.3 μm. The phase angle at the time of these observations was 1.3 and the sub-Earth latitude on each body was -36.