MASTER/GEMx: Airborne Multispectral Imagery for Mineral Mapping

Twenty-six NASA ER-2 flights collected Level 1B multispectral radiance data across the southwestern US in Spring 2024 for the Geological Earth Mapping Experiment. The MASTER instrument captured 50 spectral bands from visible to thermal infrared wavelengths at approximately 50-meter spatial resolution. Derived Level 2 products include land surface temperature and emissivity maps for five thermal infrared bands.

Use Cases

• Mapping surface geology and mineralogy based on 50-band multispectral radiance data.
• Estimating land surface temperature from derived thermal infrared emissivity products.
• Analyzing seasonal carbon monoxide sources and transport using historical MAPS instrument measurements.
• Planning future airborne surveys using provided flight paths and instrument configuration notes.

Strengths

• Covers a specific, recent campaign of 26 flights from April to June 2024.
• Provides calibrated data across a wide spectral range (0.460 to 12.879 micrometers).
• Includes both raw radiance (L1B) and derived geophysical products (L2) like temperature.

Limitations

• Metadata on row counts, file sizes, and specific column names is unavailable across all sources.
• The dataset description is conflated with unrelated MAPS carbon monoxide data, creating confusion about its primary focus.
• License is ambiguously listed as 'other-license-specified' without details.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Data collected via the MODIS/ASTER Airborne Simulator (MASTER) instrument aboard a NASA ER-2 aircraft.

Time Range

2024-04-02 to 2024-06-24

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-10 on Data.gov, but data collection ended 2024-06-24.

Geography

Southwestern United States, including California, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico.