A photometric study of regolith intimate mixing with ice-like impurity

Abstract

Surfaces of solid solar system objects are covered by layers of particulate materials called regolith originated from their surface bedrock. They preserve important information about surface geological processes. Often regolith is composed of more than one type of particle in terms of composition, maturity, size, etc. Experiments and theoretical works are being carried out to constrain the result of mixing and extract the abundance of compositional end-members from regolith spectra. In this work we have studied, photometric light scattering from simulated surfaces made of two different materials – one is highly bright quartz particles (average diameter 78.336 µm) and the other moderately bright sandstone particles (average diameter 253.757 µm). The samples were mixed with varying proportions and investigated at normal illumination conditions to avoid the shadowing effect. Said combinations may resemble ice mixed regolith on various solar system objects and therefore it is important for in situ observations. We find that the combinations show a linear trend in the corresponding reflectance data in terms of their mixing proportion and some interesting facts come out when compared to previous studies.