Photometric behavior of spectral parameters in Vesta dark and bright regions as inferred by the Dawn VIR spectrometer

Abstract

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft orbited Vesta for approximately one year, collecting thousands of hyperspectral images of its surface. The mission revealed that Vesta’s surface shows the largest variations in surface albedo on asteroids visited thus far, due to the presence of dark and bright materials at the local scale (i.e. 0.1–10km).The aim of this work is to characterize the photometric properties of bright and dark regions, and thus derive and apply an empirical photometric correction to all the hyperspectral observations of Vesta.The very large dataset (i.e. more than 20million spectra) provided by the VIR imaging spectrometer onboard Dawn enabled accurate statistical analysis of the spectral dataset, aimed at retrieving empirical relations between several spectral parameters (i.e. visible and infrared reflectance, band depths, band centers, Band Area Ratio) and the illumination/viewing angles. The derived relations made it possible to derive photometrically corrected maps of these spectral parameters and to infer information on the regolith shadowing effect in the Vestan dark and bright regions. As an additional analysis, we also evaluated the correlation between surface temperature and band center position.A general conclusion of this analysis is that, from a photometric point of view, the distinction between bright and dark material units lies mainly in the larger contribution due to multiple scattering in the bright units. We observed reflectance and band depth variations over Vesta’s entire surface, but these variations were much larger in the dark regions than in the bright ones.Band centers have been found to shift to longer wavelengths at increasing temperatures, with a trend that is the same observed for HED meteorites (Reddy et al. [2012]. Icarus 217, 153–158). Finally, the Band Area Ratio (i.e. the ratio between areas of the main pyroxene absorption bands located at 1.9μm and at 0.9μm, respectively) did not show any dependence on observational geometry, again a behavior similar to laboratory results obtained on HED meteorites (Reddy et al. [2012]. Icarus 217, 153–158).