Modelling of Zodiacal Light Emission for Space Missions

Abstract

Accurate planning of forthcoming missions requires an accurate knowledge of diffuse sources in order to optimize mission parameters and the scanning strategy. Zodiacal Light (ZL or Zody) is a well known contaminant for ground based and space-borne observations and contributes to determine the limit magnitude of a survey. Despite the physical origin of ZL is well known, predicting and modeling Zody contamination is complicated by a number of subtleties. The cloud of Interplanetary Dust Particles has a quite complex 3D structure, whose main geometrical parameters have been assessed in the last two decades, but their photometrical properties are affected by a significant level of uncertainty. The observer orbiting the Sun is moving within the cloud of IDPs, leading to an important time dependence in the perturbing signal and asking for a precise knowledge of the expected trajectory and scanning strategy of the mission. This work illustrates this problem taking the ESA Euclid mission as a case study and presenting the Zody EUclid Simulator (ZEUS) developed for this mission.