First results from NASA EMIT mission

24/10/22 21:24

EMIT was developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and launched on July 14, 2022. Since then, the instrument observes Earth from outside the International Space Station and maps dust source information and specifically what minerals are in dust source regions, so as to allow scientists to create a new mineral map of Earth’s dust-producing regions. Under the MegDeth framework, EMIT is expected to provide a valuable evaluation tool for our mineralogical database as it will provide hyperspectral scans that allow for discretisation among minerals with quite similar spectral signatures in the multispectral bands.

This first image shows the first measurements taken by EMIT on July 27, 2022, as it passed over Western Australia. The image at the front of the cube shows a mix of materials in Western Australia, including exposed soil (brown), vegetation (dark green), agricultural fields (light green), a small river, and clouds. The rainbow colors extending through the main part of the cube are the spectral fingerprints from corresponding spots in the front image.

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Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech