Could you give a brief description of ASTER and its sensor systems? <!-- remote sensing -->
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Question:
Could you give a brief description of ASTER and its sensor systems?
Answer:
At 10/16/2001 01:43 PM we wrote -
The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer is one of 5 instruments aboard the Terra platform that was launched in December, 1999. ASTER was built by a consortium of Japanese government, industry, and research groups. It has three spectral bands in the visible near-infrared (VNIR), six bands in the short-wave infrared (SWIR), and five bands in the thermal infrared (TIR) regions, with 15, 30, and 90 meters ground resolution respectively. This combination of wide spectral coverage and high spatial resolution allows ASTER to discriminate amongst a large variety of surface materials, ideal for geological studies. The VNIR subsystem is specifically endowed with a backward-viewing telescope for high-resolution stereoscopic observation in the along-track direction. The ASTER instrument is unique in two respects: one, it provides multispectral thermal infrared data of high spatial resolution, and also the highest spatial resolution surface spectral reflectance, temperature and emissivity data of all the Terra instrument sensor systems; and two, because of its limited duty cycle, data are acquired to fulfill on-demand data acquisition requests. The ASTER data products include relative spectral reflectance and emissivity, surface radiance, temperature, reflectance and emissivity, brightness temperature-at-sensor, and digital elevation models. ASTER data are expected to contribute to a wide array of application areas including, geology and soils, vegetation and ecosystem dynamics, hazards monitoring (volcanoes, wildfires, floods, landslides, and coastal erosion), land surface climatology, hydrology, and land cover change.
