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The Opposition Effect of the Moon: The Contribution of Coherent Backscatter
Abstract
The opposition effect, the sharp surge in brightness of an astronomical object observed near zero phase angle, which has been known for more than a century, has generally been explained by shadow hiding. The reflectances of several Apollo lunar soil samples have been measured as a function of phase angle in linearly and circularly polarized light. All samples exhibited a decrease in the linear polarization ratio and an increase in the circular polarization ratio in the opposition peak. This provides unequivocal proof that most of the lunar opposition effect is caused by coherent backscatter, not shadow hiding. This result has major implications for the interpretation of photometric observations of bodies in the solar system, including the Earth.
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Cited by
A Review of Nonlinear Hyperspectral Unmixing Methods
Heylen, R., Parente, M., & Gader, P. (2014) · IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing · doi:10.1109/jstars.2014.2320576 · Cited by 591
Bidirectional Reflectance Spectroscopy
Hapke, B. (2002) · Icarus · doi:10.1006/icar.2002.6853 · Cited by 489
Self-citationDisk-resolved photometric modeling and properties of asteroid (101955) Bennu
Golish, D. R., DellaGiustina, D. N., Li, J.-Y., Clark, B. E., Zou, X.-D., Smith, P. H., Rizos, J. L., Hasselmann, P. H., Bennett, C. A., Fornasier, S., et al. (2021) · Icarus · doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2020.113724 · Cited by 47
Metadata
- Authors
- Hapke, B. W., Nelson, R. M., & Smythe, W. D.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 1993-04-23
- Volume
- 260
- Issue
- 5107
- Pages
- 509-511
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W1977079104
- Cited by
- 189
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 11.98
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Opposition Effect of the Moon: The Contribution of Coherent Backscatter. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.260.5107.509
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- Hapke, B. W., Nelson, R. M., & Smythe, W. D. (1993). The Opposition Effect of the Moon: The Contribution of Coherent Backscatter. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.260.5107.509
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