  The Near-Earth Asteroid Thermal Model (NEATM, Harris, 1998) has proven to be
a reliable simple thermal model for radiometric diameter determination. However
NEATM assumes zero thermal emission on the night side of an asteroid. We
investigate how this assumption affects the best-fit beaming parameter,
overestimates the effective diameter and underestimates the albedo at large
phase angles, by testing NEATM on thermal IR fluxes generated from simulated
asteroid surfaces with different thermal inertia. We compare NEATM to radar
diameters and find that NEATM overestimates the diameter when the beaming
parameter is fitted to multi-wavelength observations and underestimates the
diameter when the default beaming parameter is used. The Night Emission
Simulated Thermal Model (NESTM) is introduced. NESTM models the night side
temperature as an iso-latitudinal fraction (f) of the maximum day side
temperature (Maximum temperature calculated for NEATM with beaming parameter =
1). A range of f is found for different thermal parameters, which depend on the
thermal inertia. NESTM diameters are compared with NEATM and radar diameters,
and it is shown that NESTM may reduce the systematic bias in overestimating
diameters. It is suggested that a version of the NESTM which assumes the
thermal inertia = 200 S.I. units is adopted as a default model when the solar
phase angle is greater than 45 degrees.
