Spectral deconvolution analysis on Olivine-Orthopyroxene mixtures with simulated space weathering modifications

Olivine and pyroxene are important mineral end-members for studying the surface material compositions of mafic bodies.The profiles of visible and near-infrared spectra of olivine-orthopyroxene mixtures systematically vary with their composition ratios.In our experiments,we combine the RELAB spectral database with new spectral data obtained from some assembled olivine-orthopyroxene mixtures.We found that the commonly-used band area ratio(BAR,Cloutis et al.)does not work well on our newly obtained spectral data.To investigate this issue,an empirical procedure based on fitted results by a modified Gaussian model is proposed to analyze the spectral curves.Following the new empirical procedure,the endmember abundances can be estimated with a 15%accuracy with some prior mineral absorption features.In addition,the mixture samples configured in our experiments are also irradiated by pulsed lasers to simulate and investigate the space weathering effects.Spectral deconvolution results confirm that low-content olivine on celestial bodies is difficult to measure and estimate.Therefore,the olivine abundance of space weathered materials may be underestimated from remote sensing data.This study may be utilized to quantify the spectral relationship of olivine-orthopyroxene mixtures and further reveal their correlation between the spectra of ordinary chondrites and silicate asteroids.

Scattering Law Analysis Based on Hapke and Lommel-Seeliger Models for Asteroidal Taxonomy

In deriving the physical properties of asteroids from their photometric data, the scattering law plays an important role, although the shape variations of asteroids result in the main variations in lightcurves. By following the physical behaviors of light reflections, Hapke et al. deduced complex functions to represent the scattering process, however, it is very hard to accurately simulate the surface scattering law in reality. For simplicity, other numerical scattering models are presented for efficiently calculating the physical properties of asteroids, such as the Lommel-Seeliger （LS） model. In this article, these two models are compared numerically. It is found that in some numerical applications the LS model in simple form with four parameters can be exploited to replace the Hapke model in complex form with five parameters. Furthermore, the generated synthetic lightcurves by the Cellinoid shape model also show that the LS model can perform as well as the Hapke model in the inversion process. Finally, by applying the Principal Component Analysis （PCA） technique to the parameters of the LS model, we present an efficient method to classify C and S type asteroids, instead of the conventional method using the parameters of the Hapke model.