ARES - A New Airborne Reflective Emissive Spectrometer

摘要

Airborne imaging spectrometers have a history of about 20 years starting with the operation of AIS in 1982. During the following years, many other instruments were built and successfully operated, e.g., AVIRIS, CASI, DAIS-7915, and HyMap. Since imaging spectrometers cover a spectral region with a large number of narrow contiguous bands they are able to retrieve the spectral reflectance signature of the Earth's surface allowing tasks such as mineral identification and abundance mapping, monitoring of vegetation properties, and assessment of water constituents. This paper introduces a new airborne imaging spectrometer, the ARES (Airborne Reflective Emissive Spectrometer) currently being built by Integrated Spectronics, Sydney, Australia, and co-financed by DLR German Aerospace Center and the GFZ GeoResearch Center Potsdam, Germany. This instrument shall feature a high performance over the entire optical wavelength range and will be available to the scientific community from 2004 on. The ARES sensor will provide approx. 160 channels in the solar reflective region (0.45-2.45 micrometers) and the thermal region (8-13 micrometers). It will consist of four co-registered individual spectrometers, three of them for the reflective and one for the thermal part of the spectrum. The spectral resolution will be between 12 and 15 nm in the solar wavelength range and less then 150 nm in the thermal. ARES will be used mainly for environmental applications in terrestrial ecosystems. The thematic focus is thought to be on soil sciences, geology, agriculture and forestry. Limnologic applications should be possible but will not play a key role in the thematic applications. For all above mentioned key application scenarios the spectral response of soils, rocks, and vegetation as well as their mixtures contain the valuable information to be extracted and quantified.