Deployment of the Modis/Aster
Airborne Simulator (Master) during Pacrim 2 Dr. I. Tapley Cooperative Research Centre for Landscape Evolution and Mineral Exploration CSIRO Exploration and Mining, Private Mail Bag No 5, Wembley, Western Australia 6913 Telephone: 61 8 9333 6263 Facsimile: 61 8 9383 9179 E-mail:i.tapley@per.dem.csiro.au Professor A. K. Milne Office of Postgraduate Studies The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia Telephone: 61 2 9385 2731 Facsimile: 61 2 9385 3733 E-MAIL : t.milne@unsw.edu.au Abstract PacRim2 was a NASA-sponsored science mission conducted in the Pacific Rim region during the period August-October 2000. While the primary objective of the mission was to collect POLSAR and TOPSAR datasets with the AIRSAR instrument, a second objective was to collect MASTER datasets to advance the development and application of MODIS and ASTER datasets currently being recorded on NASA's TERRA Earth Observation System AM-1 platform. As the name suggests and the wavelengths indicate, MASTER is the simulator instrument for these two spaceborne sensors (http://terra.nasa.gov/). When suitable weather conditions prevailed, PacRim2 provided investigators with the opportunity to collect high spatial resolution, multispectral visible, reflected IR, mid-IR and thermal IR datasets in 50 narrow-band channels over the ranges of 440-965nm, 1.63-2.43 microns, 3.08-5.33 microns and 7.7-13.0 micros respectively, from a single instrument. In addition to spectral reflectance information regarding land cover, soil properties, water quality and rock mineralization, the availability of fully calibrated thermal data in ten wavelengths will permit the calculation of surface temperature and surface spectral emittance. The latter relates to the composition of the surface and is often used for surface constituent mapping, particularly that of silicate mineralogy. The separation of temperature and emissivity can be affected using published algorithms or the ENVI image processing software package that now has an option of three utilities to convert thermal data sets from radiance to emissivity and temperature. A simple ENVI add-on tool also permits the precision ortho-rectification of MASTER data using the positional information from the Applanix GPS/INS, a digital elevation model and the full MASTER camera model. This paper will expand on the MASTER datasets and examine their applications for:
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