Near Earth Object Thermal Model (NEATM) — kete documentation

The Near Earth Asteroid Thermal Model (NEATM) is, as its name suggests, a thermal model of Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs). NEATM has a small number of parameters, meaning it works best in the regime where there is limited data on an asteroid. However as is common with any numerical model with a small number of parameters, many approximations and assumptions have been made which may not always be correct. Despite these limitations, NEATM has been successfully used to estimate with reasonable accuracy the diameter of thousands of asteroids, both NEAs and main belt. NEATM models an asteroid as a perfect Lambertian non-rotating sphere which is heated by the Sun. Because the sphere is not rotating, the night side of the asteroid is treated as having no emission at all. Clearly these are an idealized set of assumptions, which the model acknowledges by introducing an additional parameter called “Beaming”, a catch-all correction scaling factor to allow the model to adjust for the surface properti

saved by

• Jasjit Hargun