Possibility of estimating particle size and porosity on Ryugu through MARA temperature measurements

Abstract

We investigated whether the MASCOT/MARA thermal radiometer can be used to determine regolith particle size and porosity on the asteroid Ryugu in the Hayabusa2 mission. We used a one-dimensional heat flow model and our own thermal conductivity model for regolith to compare MARA's performance and the expected Ryugu surface temperatures of various particle sizes and porosities. The results showed that MARA is capable of constraining particle size with ±30% uncertainty if particle size is near 4.25 mm and near-surface porosity is near 60% (a fraction of void spaces between regolith particles in a unit volume), assuming certain physical properties of regolith particles. The porosity cannot be constrained meaningfully through MARA observations alone; however, it is constrained with uncertainty of ±10% around 50% and ±5% around 70% with 2σ probability if other supportive observations (by the MASCOT camera) provide the particle size. The results also show that nighttime temperature is more sensitive to the particle size and porosity variations and its observation is essential to achieve the small error ranges, while MARA is the only instrument to observe the nighttime temperature on Ryugu. In this study, the surface roughness effect in insolation and thermal radiations was neglected. The roughness effect is presumed to be less influential in nighttime, however, this effect must be carefully considered in actual data analysis of MARA.