{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T01:19:38Z","timestamp":1760145578441,"version":"build-2065373602"},"reference-count":42,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"16","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2024,8,9]],"date-time":"2024-08-09T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1723161600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","award":["62175251","CX434"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["62175251","CX434"]}]},{"name":"Innovation Project of Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences","award":["62175251","CX434"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["62175251","CX434"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Remote Sensing"],"abstract":"<jats:p>As a signature phenomenon of massive hypervelocity impacts (HVIs) in space, debris clouds provide critical optical information for satellite remote sensing and the assessment of large-scale impacts. However, studies of the optical scattering properties of debris clouds remain limited, and existing vector radiative transfer (VRT) methods struggle to accurately simulate the optical characteristics of these complex scatterers. To address this gap, this paper presents an improved Monte Carlo VRT program (PGS\u2013MC) for multicomponent polydisperse scatterers to precisely evaluate the radiation and polarization characteristics of complex scatterers. Based on the Monte Carlo ray tracing (MCRT) method, our program introduces a particle grouping strategy (PGS) to further emphasize the importance of accounting for optical property discrepancies between different materials and particle sizes, thus significantly improving the fidelity of VRT simulations. Moreover, our program, developed using the compute unified device architecture (CUDA), can be run parallelly on graphics processing units (GPUs), which effectively reduces the computational time. The validation results indicated that the developed PGS\u2013MC program can accurately and efficiently simulate the polarization of complex 3D scatterers. A further investigation showed that the polarization characteristics of debris clouds are highly sensitive to parameters such as the angle between the incident and detection directions, number density, particle size distribution, debris material, and wavelength. In addition, the polarization imaging of debris clouds offers distinct advantages over intensity imaging. This study offers guidance for analyzing the VRT properties of massive HVI debris clouds. Additionally, it provides a practical tool and concrete ideas for modeling the polarization characteristics of various complex scatterers, such as aircraft contrails and clouds, etc.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/rs16162925","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2024,8,12]],"date-time":"2024-08-12T08:54:08Z","timestamp":1723452848000},"page":"2925","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Polarization Characteristics of Massive HVI Debris Clouds Using an Improved Monte Carlo Ray Tracing Method for Remote Sensing Applications"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"16","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0001-6024-6075","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Guangsen","family":"Liu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200083, China"},{"name":"Key Laboratory of Intelligent Infrared Perception, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200083, China"},{"name":"University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6701-4034","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Peng","family":"Rao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200083, China"},{"name":"Key Laboratory of Intelligent Infrared Perception, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200083, China"},{"name":"University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0009-7555-5477","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yao","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200083, China"},{"name":"Key Laboratory of Intelligent Infrared Perception, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200083, China"},{"name":"University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0008-0813-8190","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Wen","family":"Sun","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200083, China"},{"name":"Key Laboratory of Intelligent Infrared Perception, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200083, China"},{"name":"University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2024,8,9]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","first-page":"289","article-title":"Development of kill assessment technology for space-based applications","volume":"29","author":"Erlandson","year":"2010","journal-title":"Johns Hopkins APL Tech. 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