Robert Green:
From 70,000ft above the desert, everything looks barren and brown. We have an instrument attached to the bottom of the plane collecting data. And when the data is processed, it looks like a colorful painting revealing what is hidden in plain sight.
We're now looking in the western United States for critical minerals. Critical minerals are a category of minerals that are essential for U.S. national security, industry, and for the economy of the future. Some of the examples where they’re used is in our cell phones, in our computers, in our planes. NASA and the USGS have teamed up to find deposits of these minerals for a mission called the Geological Earth Mapping Experiment, known as GEMx.
Lithium, aluminum, cobalt, neodymium.... these are a few of the 50 critical minerals deemed essential to the U.S. national security, technology industries, the energy sector, and our economy as a whole. Every mineral reflects light slightly differently, so they have a unique spectral signature. Now, what NASA has invented is a technology called imaging spectroscopy, where we collect an image, we collect hundreds of wavelengths of light that go beyond the wavelengths our eyes can see so we can actually understand the chemistry of what we're observing. The minerals that contain rare earths have a unique spectral signature. The minerals contain lithium, have unique spectral signatures. Our eye can't discriminate these when we see them on the ground necessarily, but with a spectral fingerprint from an imaging spectrometer, we can map these directly around the western United States and with EMIT on the space station around the world that allow us to identify and find those critical mineral deposits. In 2022, NASA launched the most advanced imaging spectrometer to fly on the International Space Station, specifically to map minerals in arid land regions, including critical minerals around the world and in our nation. We invented it initially as we went to the moon and Mars, because that was a good way to understand what the minerals that make up the moon and Mars.
But now we're bringing it back to Earth, and we can look in the desert Southwest with this NASA invented technology called imaging spectroscopy. The advantage of an aircraft is we can be closer to the ground, so we can see higher concentrations of the minerals that we're trying to map. And then we have the spaceborne version to take us around the planet as we look for these critical minerals.
It's exciting to be able to use this technology to map minerals that can be of value to our nation in so many ways to our economy, the national security, and pursue our science objectives. And that's incredibly fulfilling to make these measurements that's benefiting our nation.