# Tomographic inversion of gravity gradient field for a synthetic Itokawa model

## TL;DR

This paper presents a novel tomographic inversion method using a randomized multiresolution scan to reconstruct asteroid interior density from gravity gradient data, enhancing resolution and noise robustness for space mission applications.

## Contribution

It introduces a randomized multiresolution inversion algorithm that improves internal density reconstruction of asteroids from gravity data, accounting for noise and discretization effects.

## Key findings

- Effective reconstruction of asteroid interior density variations.
- Detection of internal voids and anomalies with low noise levels.
- Reduction of surface bias in inverse solutions.

## Abstract

This article investigates reconstructing the internal mass density of a numerical asteroid model using the gradient of a simulated gravity field as synthetic measurement data. Our goal is to advance the mathematical inversion methodology and find feasibility constraints for the resolution, noise and orbit selection for future space missions. We base our model on the shape of the asteroid Itokawa as well as on the recent observations and simulation studies which suggest that the internal density varies, increasing towards the center, and that the asteroid may have a detailed structure. We introduce randomized multiresolution scan algorithm which might provide a robust way to cancel out bias and artifact effects related to the measurement noise and numerical discretization. In this scheme, the inverse algorithm can reconstruct details of various sizes without fixing the exact resolution {\em a priori}, and the randomization minimizes the effect of discretization on the solution. We show that the adopted methodology provides an advantageous way to diminish the surface bias of the inverse solution. The results also suggest that a noise level below 80 Eotvos will be sufficient for the detection of internal voids and high density anomalies, if a sparse set of measurements can be obtained from a close-enough distance to the target.