THE characterization of the gravity fields of small celestial bodies, including asteroids, comets, and small moons, is a critical problem of celestial mechanics that has not yet been solved satisfactorily. Unlike the large bodies of the solar system, small bodies do not have sufficiently strong gravity to overcome their material strength, such that they usually exhibit irregular shapes and heterogeneous mass distributions. The Newtonian gravitational potential is a scalar function defined by a volume integral of the product of the reciprocal distance and density function over the entire body. There is no closed formula for the volume integral in the case of such irregular body domains and heterogeneous mass distributions. This is the reason for the difficulty in precisely calculating the gravity fields of small bodies.
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