Related papers: Ceres' opposition effect observed by the Dawn fram…
The dwarf planet Ceres is likely differentiated similar to the terrestrial planets but with a water/ice dominated mantle and an aqueously altered crust. Detailed modeling of Ceres' phase function has never been performed to understand its…
Planets and moons in our Solar System have strongly peaked reflected light phase curves at opposition. In this work, we produce a modified reflected light phase curve model and use it to fit the Cassini phase curves of Jupiter and…
Previous observations suggested that Ceres has active but possibly sporadic water outgassing, and possibly varying spectral characteristics in a time scale of months. We used all available data of Ceres collected in the past three decades…
Bright features have been recently discovered by Dawn on Ceres, which extend previous photometric and Space Telescope observations. These features should produce distortions of the line profiles of the reflected solar spectrum and therefore…
We present a global spectrophotometric characterization of the Ceres surface using Dawn Framing Camera (FC) images. We identify the photometric model that yields the best results for photometrically correcting images. Corrected FC images…
We report a comprehensive analysis of the global spectrophotometric properties of Ceres using Dawn Framing Camera images collected from April to June 2015 during the RC3 and Survey mission phases. The single-scattering albedo of Ceres at…
Theoretical frameworks for reflection and emission spectroscopy of exoplanet surfaces are becoming increasingly important for the characterization of rocky exoplanets, especially with the rapid growth of the detected exoplanet population…
Variations and spatial distributions of bright and dark material on dwarf planet Ceres play a key role in understanding the processes that have led to its present surface composition. We define limits for bright and dark material in order…
We study the physical characteristics (shape, dimensions, spin axis direction, albedo maps, mineralogy) of the dwarf-planet Ceres based on high-angular resolution near-infrared observations. We analyze adaptive optics J/H/K imaging…
A diurnal varying haze layer at the bright spots of Occator on dwarf planet Ceres has been reported from images of the Dawn Framing Camera. This finding is supported by ground-based observations revealing diurnal albedo changes at Occator's…
The Visible-Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIR) on board the Dawn spacecraft revealed that aqueous secondary minerals -- Mg-phyllosilicates, NH4-bearing phases, and Mg/Ca carbonates -- are ubiquitous on Ceres. Ceres' low reflectance…
Context: The dwarf planet (1) Ceres - next target of the NASA Dawn mission - is the largest body in the asteroid main belt; although several observations of this body have been performed so far, the presence of surface water ice is still…
We study the surface of Ceres at visible wavelengths, as observed by the Visible and InfraRed mapping spectrometer (VIR) onboard the Dawn spacecraft, and analyze the variations of various spectral parameters across the whole surface. We…
The reflectance of a particulate surface depends on the phase angle at which it is observed. This is true for laboratory measurements on powders of natural materials as well as remote observations of Solar System surfaces. Here, we measured…
We study the spectrophotometric properties of dwarf planet Ceres in the VIS-IR spectral range by means of hyper-spectral images acquired by the VIR imaging spectrometer on board the NASA Dawn mission. Disk-resolved observations with a phase…
The two major factors contributing to the opposition brightening of Saturn's rings are i) the intrinsic brightening of particles due to coherent backscattering and/or shadow-hiding on their surfaces, and ii) the reduced interparticle…
We present the results of photometric observations carried out with four small telescopes of the asteroid 4 Vesta in the $B$, $R_{\rm C}$, and $z'$ bands at a minimum phase angle of 0.1 $\timeform{D}$. The magnitudes, reduced to unit…
C/2002 CE$_{10}$ is an object in a retrograde elliptical orbit with Tisserand parameter $-0.853$ indicating a likely origin in the Oort Cloud. It appears to be a rather inactive comet since no coma and only a very weak tail was detected…
Phase angle-induced spectral effects are important to characterize since they affect spectral band parameters such as band depth and band center, and therefore skew mineralogical interpretations of planetary bodies via reflectance…
We collect well-measured opposition surge properties for many icy bodies orbiting the Sun (mostly from our own observations) plus for many icy moons, resulting in a data base of surface and orbital properties for 52 icy bodies. (1) We put…