Errors in calculated planetary phase functions and albedos due to neglecting polarization

Errors in calculated planetary phase functions and albedos due to neglecting polarization

Accurate calculations of disk-integrated quantities such as planetary phase functions and albedos will be crucial for the analysis of direct observations of light that is reflected by extrasolar planets. We show that adopting a scalar representation of light and thus neglecting the polarized nature of light leads to significant, wavelength dependent, errors in calculated planetary phase functio...

Correcting for Decorrelation Due to Atmospheric Phase Errors

Evaluation of errors from neglecting polarization in the forward modeling of O2 A band measurements from space, with relevance to CO2 column retrieval from polarization-sensitive instruments

Sensitivity studies have been performed to evaluate the errors resulting from ignoring polarization in analyzing spectroscopic measurements of the O2 A band from space, using the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) as a test case. An 11-layer atmosphere, with both gas and aerosol loading, and bounded from below by a lambertian reflecting surface, was used for the study. The numerical computations...

Correction of Errors in Polarization Based Dynamic Phase Shifting Interferometers

Polarization based interferometers for single snap-shot measurements allow single frame, quantitative phase acquisition for vibration insensitive measurements of optical surfaces and have been successfully used on a variety of interferometer types. This technique generally involves the simultaneous acquisition of three or more images on the same camera or multiple cameras, which are phase shift...

Solving for closure errors due to polarization leakage in radio interferometry of unpolarized sources

Mechanical and electronic imperfections can result into polarization leakage in individual antennas of a radio interferometer. Such leakages manifest themselves as closure errors even in co-polar visibility measurements of unpolarized sources. This paper describes and tests a method for the study of polarization leakage for radio interferometric telescopes using only the nominally co-polar visi...