Joint works of foreign scientists and their colleagues from FEFU (Far Eastern Federal University) have developed a new method for the space probing of comets and interplanetary dust. The essence of this approach is the partial polarization of reflected sunlight by physical bodies. It is due to this effect that it will be possible to obtain data on the composition, size and structure of objects for remote sensing of comets and clouds of interplanetary dust.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian physicist Nikolai Umov became the author of the work on the reflectivity of the object and its connection with the level of polarization of the light reflected by it. It is on this basis that a new developed methodology is based.
In the course of carrying out the latest research, the above Umov law has manifested itself to the same extent both in the case of the Moon, that is, at large objects, and in the case of dust from outer space and the atmosphere - with single micron particles. In this way, it became possible to accurately determine the concentration of dust particles in both the open space and the Earth's atmosphere.
With the help of Umov's law, scientists will analyze data obtained as a result of polarimetric observations of the earth's atmosphere. The results of the research will be published by the international journals Optics Letters and Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer.