3D Polarized Radiative Transfer for Solar System Applications Using the public-domain HYPERION Code

We present a public-domain radiative transfer tool that will allow researchers to examine a wide-range of interesting solar system applications. Hyperion is a new three-dimensional continuum Monte-Carlo radiative transfer code that is designed to be as general as possible, allowing radiative transfer to be computed through a variety of three-dimensional grids (Robitaille, 2011, Astronomy & Astrophysics 536 A79). The main part of the code is problem-independent, and only requires the user to define the three-dimensional density structure, and the opacity and the illumination properties (as well as a few parameters that control execution and output of the code). Hyperion is written in Fortran 90 and parallelized using the MPI-2 standard. It is bundled with Python libraries that enable very flexible pre- and post-processing options (arbitrary shapes, multiple aerosol components, etc.). These routines are very amenable to user-extensibility. The package is currently distributed at www.hyperion-rt.org. Our presentation will feature 1) a brief overview of the code, including a description of the solar system-specific modifications that we have made beyond the capabilities in the original release; 2) Several solar system applications (i.e., Deep Impact Plume, Martian atmosphere, etc.); 3) discussion of availability and distribution of code components via www.hyperion-rt.org.