NASA has a brand new high-tech sensor to assist the seek for essential minerals within the American West.
The sensor known as AVIRIS-5 (Airborne Seen/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-5), and it comes from expertise developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) again within the Seventies. Concerning the measurement of a microwave, AVIRIS-5 matches contained in the nostril of one in all NASA’s ER-2 high-altitude analysis plane. The sensor’s first iteration was employed in 1986, and JPL has labored to enhance it ever since.
GEMx is an ongoing project. One of the reasons why deserts are an ideal spot for mineral spectroscopy is because few trees grow there. Since 2023, the joint team has covered more than 366,000 square miles (950,000 square kilometers) in the vast expanse of the American West.
Many of the minerals that the GEMx project is trying to find have “unique chemical structures,” that reflect different wavelengths of light. By detecting this reflected light, AVIRIS-5 is able to uncover the “spectral fingerprints” that are specific to the critical minerals.
The USGS defines critical minerals as people who have “vital penalties for the financial or nationwide safety of the U.S.” These embrace aluminum, lithium, zinc, graphite, tungsten and titanium. Minerals equivalent to these are used within the manufacturing provide chains for essential applied sciences equivalent to semiconductors, photo voltaic electrical energy programs or electrical automobile batteries.
In March 2025, the White Home issued an Executive Order to spice up the manufacturing of those minerals “to the utmost potential extent,” stating that American nationwide and financial safety are “now acutely threatened by our reliance upon hostile international powers’ mineral manufacturing”
Other than serving to hunt for essential minerals, spectrometers much like AVIRIS-5 that JPL has designed over time have additionally been used on spacecraft to assist NASA scientists perceive extra about planets in our photo voltaic system, like Mars, Mercury, and Pluto.
“One is en path to Europa, an ocean moon of Jupiter, to seek for the chemical components wanted to help life,” a JPL spokesperson wrote in a statement.
Dana Chadwick, a JPL Earth system scientist, envisions many extra makes use of for the brand new sensor moreover looking minerals within the desert.
“The breadth of various questions you possibly can tackle with this expertise is absolutely thrilling, from land administration to snowpack water assets to wildfire danger,” Chadwick mentioned in an announcement. “Important minerals are only the start for AVIRIS-5.”
