A group of universities have come together with the aim of designing and developing Small Aperture Robotic Telescopes (SmART) for use by students to observe variable stars and transient follow-ups. The group is deliberating on the components of the robotic system; e.g. the telescope, the mount, the back-end camera, control software, and their integration keeping in mind the scientific objectives. The prototype might then be replicated by all the participating universities to provide round the clock observations from sites spread evenly in longitude across the globe. Progress made so far is reported in this paper.

The surfaces of most atmosphereless solar system objects are referred to as regolith, layers of loosely connected fragmentary debris, produced by meteorite impacts. Measurements of light scattered from such surfaces provides information about the composition and structure of the surface. A suitable way to characterize the scattering properties is to consider how the intensity and polarization of scattered light depends on the particle size, composition, porosity, roughness, wavelength of incident light and the geometry of observation. In the present work, the effect of porosity on bidirectional re ectance as a function of phase angle is studied for alumina powder with grain size of 0.3 μm and olivine powder with grain size of 49 μm at 543.5 nm. The optical constants of the alumina sample for each porosity were calculated with Maxwell Garnett eective medium theory. On using each of the optical constants of alumina sample in Mie theory with the Hapke model the variation of bidirectional re ectance is obtained as a function of phase angle with porosity as a parameter. Experimental re ectance data are in good agreement the model. For the olivine sample the effect of porosity is studied using Hapke (2008).