The Airborne Visible / Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-3 (AVIRIS-3) instrument is the newest member of NASA’s AVIRIS airborne imaging spectrometer family. A Dyson pushbroom spectrometer similar to the satellite-based Earth Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) instrument, AVIRIS-3 offers higher throughput, a higher signal-to-noise ratio, and a more compact form factor than previous AVIRIS generations. AVIRIS-3 relies upon in-flight data to create updates to the wavelength, flatfield, and radiometric calibration using features from Earth’s surface and atmosphere. This technique of applying calibration updates derived from in-flight, solar-illuminated Earth scenes will be used in NASA’s upcoming Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) mission. We discuss the calibration method and first results from the first year of flights from AVIRIS-3.

Imaging spectrometers like EMIT and AVIRIS-3 have similar instrument parameters and methane and CO2 mapping capability that enables direct attribution of observed plumes to the oil and gas, waste, and agriculture sectors. Onboard the International Space Station, EMIT can constrain methane and CO2 emissions over a significant portion of the Earth’s surface. With improved spatial resolution, the airborne AVIRIS-3 instrument enables quantification of smaller emissions sources that compliment EMIT observations from space. These instruments offer the potential to improve understanding of greenhouse gas budgets, inform mitigation strategies, and in some cases lead to voluntary mitigation.

Earth and planetary sciences often rely upon the detailed examination of spectroscopic data for rock and mineral identification. This typically requires the collection of high resolution spectroscopic measurements. However, they tend to be scarce, as compared to low resolution remote spectra. This work addresses the problem of inferring high-resolution mineral spectroscopic measurements from low resolution observations using probability models. We present the Deep Gaussian Conditional Model, a neural network that performs probabilistic super resolution via maximum likelihood estimation. It also provides insight into learned correlations between measurements and spectroscopic features, allowing for the tractability and interpretability that scientists often require for mineral identification. Experiments using remote spectroscopic data demonstrate that our method compares favorably to other analogous probabilistic methods. Finally, we show and discuss how our method provides human-interpretable results, making it a compelling analysis tool for scientists.

We demonstrate real-time model-based atmospheric correction onboard the Next Generation Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer. We achieve a reduction in processing time from hours or days to seconds by modifying a standard physics-based atmospheric correction algorithm to support real-time execution. We achieved this reduction by modifying the physics-based ATmospheric REMoval algorithm to leverage a large lookup table of precomputed scattering and transmission coefficients, indexed by parameters specifying the aircraft operating conditions at capture time. Interpolation among the precomputed coefficients allows surface reflectance retrieval at the sensor acquisition rate of 500 Mb/s. Our system produced science-quality reflectance products during over 30 test flights and, to our knowledge, is the first reported demonstration of real-time model-driven visible shortwave infrared atmospheric correction onboard an aircraft.

An Airborne Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (AirMISR) instrument has been developed to assist in validation of the Earth Observing System (EOS) MISR experiment. Unlike the EOS MISR, which contains nine individual cameras pointed at discrete look angles, AirMISR utilizes a single camera in a pivoting gimbal mount. The AirMISR camera has been fabricated from MISR brassboard and engineering model components and, thus, has similar radiometric and spectral response as the MISR cameras. This paper provides a description of the AirMISR instrument and summarizes the results of engineering flights conducted during 1997.