Meet Mineral Mappers Flying NASA Tech Out West
NASA and US Geological Survey are mapped the planets from Apollo. A team is looking closer to you for essential minerals for national security and economics.
If not for Joshua trees, the hills tanned with cuprite, Nevada, would look like Mars. Speed and chemically modified by the water of the deep subsoil, the rocks here are terrestrial analogues to understand ancient Martian geology. The hills are also rich in minerals. They attracted prospectors for more than 100 years and made cupritis an ideal place to test NASA technology designed to map minerals, craters, crusts and ice creams from our solar system.
The sensors that discovered lunar water, the trace of the moons of Saturn, even investigated the zero field in New York were all tested and calibrated in cuprite, said Robert Green, principal researcher at the NASA propulsion laboratory in southern California. It is perfected by instruments at Nevada for decades.
One of the latest Green’s projects is to find and map the rocky areas in the American West which could contain crucial minerals for national economics and security. Currently, the United States depend on imports of 50 critical minerals, which include lithium and rare land elements used in everything, rechargeable medicine batteries.
US Geological Survey (USGS) scientists are looking for domestic sources at the national level. NASA contributes to this effort with high altitude planes and sensors capable of detecting the molecular fingerprints of minerals through large expanses without trees in the wavelengths of light not visible to human eyes.
Collaboration is called GEMX, the cartography experience of geological earth, and it is probably the largest airborne spectroscopic survey in American history. Since 2023, scientists working on GEMX have drawn more than 190,000 square miles (500,000 square kilometers) of North American soil.
While NASA instruments fly in 60,000-foot (18,000 meters) planes above his head, Todd Hoefen, a geophysicist, and his USGS colleagues work below. The rock samples they test and collect on the ground are crucial to ensure that airborne observations correspond to reality on the ground and are not biased by the intermediate atmosphere.
The GEMX mission marks the last of a long history of partnerships between NASA and USGS. The two agencies worked together to map Rocky Worlds – and protect astronauts and Rovers – since the first days of the space race.
For example, the geological maps of the moon made in the early 1960s at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona, helped the planners of the Apollo mission to select safe and scientifically promising sites for the six landings to the crew that occurred from 1969 to 1972. Before moving on the surface of Lunar, NASA with geologists from the NASA moon. A version of these Apollo training camps continues today with astronauts and scientists involved in the NASA Artemis mission.
To detect minerals and other compounds on the surfaces of rocky bodies through the solar system, including earth, scientists use a technology launched by JPL in the 1980s called imaging spectroscopy. One of the original imaging spectrometers built by Robert Green and his team is at the heart of the GEMX campaign in the western United States
About the size and weight of a minifridge and built to fly on plans, the instrument is called Aviris-Classic, abbreviated for the visible imaging / airborne infrared spectrometer. Like all imaging spectrometers, it benefits from the fact that each molecule is reflected and absorbs light in a unique pattern, such as a fingerprint. The spectrometers detect these molecular fingerprints in the bouncing light or emitted from a sample or a surface.
In the case of GEMX, it is the scintillating sunlight different types of rocks.
Compared to a standard digital camera, which “sees” three colored channels (red, green and blue), imaging spectrometers can see more than 200 channels, including light infrared wavelengths that are invisible to the human eye.
The spectrometers of NASA have orbited or piloted by all the main rocky bodies of our solar system. They helped scientists study methane lakes on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon and study the thin atmosphere of Pluto. A spectrometer built by JPL is currently on the way to Europa, an ice moon from Jupiter, to help seek chemical ingredients necessary to support life.
“One of NASA’s interesting things is that we are developing technology to look at the solar system and beyond, but we are also going back and looking back,” said Ben Phillips, a long-standing program manager of NASA who directed Gemx to his retirement in 2025.
More than 200 hours of GEMX flights are planned until the fall of 2025. Scientists will process and validate data, with the first USGS mineral cards to follow. During these flights, an ER-2 research aircraft from the Armstrong Flight Research Center in NASA in Edwards, California, will cross the western United States at twice as high altitudes as a jet of passengers.
At such altitudes, the Dean Neeley driver must wear a spatial combination similar to that used by astronauts. He steals solo in the cramped cockpit but will be accompanied by advanced NASA instruments. In the belly of the plane, Aviris-Classic, who will retire shortly after more than three decades in service. The nose is carefully packed in the nose of the plane: Aviris-5, taking off for the first time in 2025.
Together, the two instruments provide the performance of the older spectrometer 10 times alone, but even in itself, Aviris-5 marks a leap forward. It can sample areas ranging from about 30 feet (10 meters) for less than one foot (30 centimeters).
“The new generation of Aviris will be more than at the height of the original,” said Green.
The GeMX research project will last four years and is funded by the USGS Earth Mapping Resources initiative. The initiative will capitalize on both the technology developed by NASA for spectroscopic imaging, as well as on the expertise of the agency in the analysis of data sets and extract critical mineral information.
The data collected by GEMX is available here.
Andrew Wang / Jane J. Lee
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
626-379-6874 / 818-354-0307
Andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov / jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Elizabeth Vlock
NASA seat, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / Elizabeth.a.vlock@nasa.gov
Written by Sally Younger
2025-086
