Photometry of dark atmosphereless planetary bodies: an efficient numerical model

We present a scattering model for regolith-covered Solar System bodies. It can be used to compute the intensity of light scattered by a surface consisting of packed, mutually shadowing particles. Our intention is to provide a model in which other researchers can apply in studies of Solar System photometry.Our model is a Lommel–Seeliger type model, representing a medium composed of individual scatterers with small single-scattering albedo. This means that it is suitable for dark regolith surfaces such as the Moon and many classes of asteroids. Our model adds an additional term which takes into account the mutual shadowing between the scatterers. The scatterers can have an arbitrary phase function. We use a numerical ray-tracing simulation to compute the shadowing contribution.We present the model in a form which makes implementing it in existing software straightforward and fast. The model in practice is implemented as files containing pre-computed values of the surface reflection coefficient, which can be loaded into a user's program and used to compute the scattering in the desired viewing geometries. As the usage requires only a little simple arithmetic and a table look-up, it is as fast to use as common analytical models.