Results from the paper - Geodesy of irregular small bodies via neural density fields: geodesyNets

Asteroids' and comets' geodesy is of increasing interest in a wide range of fields ranging from astronomy to potential future mining prospects, as well as being essential to successful proximity operations of spacecraft.

This data contains the ground truths and the trained models (neural density fields) resulted applying a novel approach based on artificial neural networks, so-called geodesyNets as presented in the paper: "Geodesy of irregular small bodies via neural density fields: geodesyNets". The paper summarizes the results of the project carried out in 2020 at the Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency.

Each GeodesyNet represents the mass density of an irregular body (e.g. asteroid or comet) as reconstructed by the network from gravity measurements.

Models learned of six different bodies are present: the asteroids 433 Eros, 25143 Itokawa and 101955 Bennu and the comet 67P Churyumov–Gerasimenko, as well as a fictitious Planetesimal and a toroidal shaped body called Torus. The ground truth used to generate synthetic measurements is also present in the form of mascon models.