Orbital Gamma-Ray Prospecting

Real planetary and asteroid mineral prospecting from orbit doesn't photograph ore — it counts gamma-ray photons emitted by radioactive decay and cosmic-ray-induced nuclear reactions in the regolith, the same technique flown on Lunar Prospector, Dawn and NASA's Psyche mission to a metal-rich asteroid. This simulator flies a spectrometer around a synthetic mineral-bearing body with a hidden true abundance map, and rebuilds a "measured" map in real time from Poisson-noisy counts collected on every overflight. Orbit altitude and the instrument's collimator field of view set the geometric footprint and the inverse-square signal strength, orbit speed controls how much dwell time each ground track gets, and the live count rate, footprint diameter, surveyed coverage and RMS map error show the fundamental trade-off between spatial resolution and signal-to-noise that every real spectrometer mission has to budget for.