ASTER Data Analyses for Lithological Discrimination of Sittampundi Anorthositic Complex, Southern India

Abstract

ASTER is an advanced Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer, a multispectral sensor, which measures reflected and emitted electromagnetic radiation of earth surface with 14 bands. The present study aims to delineate different rock types in the Sittampundi Anorthositic Complex (SAC), Tamil Nadu using Visible (VIS), near-infrared (NIR) and short wave infrared (SWIR) reflectance data of ASTER 9 band data. We used different band ratioing, band combinations in the VNIR and SWIR region for discriminating lithological boundaries. SAC is also considered as a lunar highland analog rock. Anorthosite is a plagioclase-rich igneous rock with subordinate amounts of pyroxenes, olivine and other minerals. A methodology has been applied to correct the cross talk effect and radiance to reflectance. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has been realized on the 9 ASTER bands in order to reduce the redundancy information in highly correlated bands. PCA derived FCC results enable the validation and support to demarcate the different lithological boundaries defined on previous geological map. The image derived spectral profiles for anorthosite are compared with the ASTER resampled laboratory spectra, JHU spectral library spectra and Apollo 14 lunar anorthosites spectra. The Spectral Angle Mapping imaging spectroscopy technique has been practiced to classify the ASTER image of the study area and found that, the processing of ASTER remote sensing data set can be used as a powerful tool for mapping the terrestrial Anorthositic regions and similar kind of process could be applied to map the planetary surfaces (E.g. Moon).

Satellite data based abundance mapping of mafic and ultramafic rocks in Mettupalayam, Tamil Nadu, India

“…Through fieldwork, the mafic and ultramafic rock samples were collected along with the ground control point (GCP). The atmospherically corrected ASTER data acquisition from the USGS Earth Explorer and the conversion of radiance to reflectance were done using the procedure mentioned by Arivazhagan & Anbazhagan (2017). The first nine bands of ASTER data in the range of the visible and infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum are used to generate the band combination.…”

“…The absorption is occurred based on the chemical content of the mineral and through characterizing the absorption features, the rocks could be identified and validated with either standard spectral libraries like USGS, JHU, or developed by the researchers. The pixel purity index and matched filtering are the commonly used method to identify the lithological features (Clark 1999, Arivazhagan & Anbazhagan 2017. The present study aims to identify the abundance of mafic and ultramafic rocks in the Mettupalayam area, based on spectral characterization and image processing methods.…”

Reflectance spectra and AVIRIS-NG airborne hyperspectral data analysis for mapping ultramafic rocks in igneous terrain

“…The anorthosites in Sittampundi are relatively dominated by pure calcic anorthite (An 82-100) with less than 10 % of mafic minerals. 6,44 Arivazhagan and Anbazhagan 49 utilised Landsat7 ETM multispectral satellite data and ASTER data for mapping rock types of the anorthosite complex. The multispectral remote sensing data provide broad spectral signatures for anorthosites in the study area.…”

Exploratory Remote Sensing Studies to Determine the Mineralization Zones around the Zarshuran Gold Mine

“…In this study, the image of the ASTER Satellite Sensor was used. ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) is a high resolution imaging instrument that is flying on the Terra satellite [11]. ASTER will obtain detailed maps of land surface temperature, emissivity, reflectance and elevation of the Earth.…”