Forward and inverse models for photon transport in soil-ice mixtures and their application to the problem of retrieving optical properties of planetary surfaces

Remote sensing studies are often based on simplified approaches describing the photon transport in absorbing and scattering media. The main purpose of the present paper is to show the potentiality of modeling directly the transport phenomena by mean of linear Boltzmann equation. Some details about the solution method of the integro-differential equation are reported with a collection of results of relevance in planetary study domain. An inverse approach based on artificial neural network is also proposed to retrieve the optical properties of planetary surfaces and its performances are tested in various cases.