Called AVIRIS-5, it is the latest in a long line of sensors pioneered by NASA's JPL to explore the Earth, the Moon and other worlds.
A new NASA sensor mounted on the nose of a high-altitude research plane has taken to the skies to help geoscientists map rocks containing lithium and other important minerals on the Earth's surface at a depth of about 60,000 feet. These flights, conducted in collaboration with the United States Geological Survey (USGS), are part of the largest air campaign of its kind in the nation's history.
But that's just one of many challenges on the horizon for AVIRIS-5, short for Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-5, which has much in common with sensors used to explore other planets.
AVIRIS-5, about the size of a microwave oven, detects spectral fingerprints of minerals and other compounds in reflected sunlight. Like its space-flying cousins, the sensor takes advantage of the fact that all types of molecules, from rare earth elements Flower pigments have unique chemical structures that absorb and reflect different wavelengths of light.
This technology was first used at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California in the late 1970s. Over the decades, imaging spectrometers have visited every major rocky body in the solar system from Mercury to Pluto. They traced Martian crust revealed in all spectral detail lakes on Titan and tracked mineral-rich dust through the Sahara and other deserts. One of them on the way to Europeocean satellite of Jupiter, to search for chemical ingredients necessary to support life.
Another NASA imaging spectrometer. Lunar Mineralogy Cartographerwas the first to detect water on the surface of the Moon in 2009. “This data set continues to drive our exploration as we search for resources on the Moon” as part of NASA's Artemis campaign, said Robert Greene, a senior scientist at NASA JPL who has participated in numerous spectroscopic missions throughout the solar system.
Imaging spectrometers vary depending on their purpose, but they share some common equipment—including mirrors, detector arrays, and electron beam gratings—designed to capture light flickering off a surface and then separate it into its component colors, like a prism.
Many of the best-in-class imaging spectrometers in existence today are made possible by components invented at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Laboratory of microdevices. Instrument manufacturers combine advances in physics, chemistry and materials science with the classical properties of light discovered by physicist Isaac Newton in the 17th century. Newton's prism experiments showed that visible light was made up of the colors of the rainbow.
Today, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers are working with advanced materials such as black silicon—one of the darkest substances ever produced—to improve performance. Under a powerful microscope, black silicon looks like a forest of prickly needles. Nanoscale structures, etched by laser or chemicals, prevent stray light from reaching the sample by trapping it in their spikes.
The optical techniques used at the MicroInstrumentation Laboratory have been continuously improved since the first AVIRIS instrument took flight in 1986. Four generations of these sensors have already taken to the skies, analyzing volcanic eruptions, diseased cropsground zero debris in New York and wildfires in Alabama, among many other events. The latest model, AVIRIS-5, has a spatial resolution that is twice that of its predecessor and can resolve areas from less than a foot (30 centimeters) to about 30 feet (10 meters).
This year he has flown more than 200 hours of high-altitude flights over Nevada, California and other western states as part of a project called GEMx (Geological experiment to map the Earth). The flights are conducted on NASA's ER-2 aircraft operated at the agency's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. The effort is the aerial component of a larger USGS initiative called the Earth Resources Mapping Initiative.Earth MRI) to modernize mapping of the country's surface and subsurface.
The NASA and USGS team have been collecting data since 2023 across more than 366,000 square miles (950,000 square kilometers) of the American West, where dry, treeless expanses are well suited for mineral spectroscopy.
An exciting early discovery was a lithium-bearing clay called hectorite, discovered in, among other places, the tailings of an abandoned mine in California. Lithium is one of about 50 minerals at risk of supply chain disruption, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. considered critical national security and economy.
Helping communities extract new value from old and abandoned sites is one of GEMx's long-term ambitions, according to Dana Chadwick, an Earth system scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The same applies to identifying sources of acidic mine drainage water, which can occur when waste rocks weather and leach into the environment.
“The breadth of different issues you can address with this technology is really exciting, from land management to snowpack water resources to wildfire risk,” Chadwick said. “Critical minerals are just the beginning for AVIRIS-5.”
The GEMx research project is expected to last four years and will be funded by the USGS Earth MRI through investments from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. The initiative will draw on both technology developed by NASA for spectroscopic imaging and expertise in analyzing data sets and extracting important information about minerals from them.
To learn more about GEMx, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/gemx/
News Media Contacts
Andrew Wang / Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
626-379-6874 / 818-393-2433
[email protected] / [email protected]
Written by Sally Younger
2025-136
