From 60,000 Feet: NASA's AVIRIS-5 Pinpoints Lithium And Other Critical Minerals

NASA's next-generation imaging spectrometer, AVIRIS-5, is now surveying the American West from roughly 60,000 feet, mapping lithium-rich rocks and other critical minerals with unprecedented speed and detail.

High-Altitude Precision

About the size of a microwave oven, AVIRIS-5 is mounted on a high-altitude ER-2 research aircraft. From that stratospheric vantage, the instrument reads faint spectral fingerprints by analyzing how sunlight reflects off minerals, clays, pigments and other surface compounds, enabling scientists to identify materials remotely and at high resolution.

Program And Early Results

Operated in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), AVIRIS-5 is part of the Geological Earth Mapping Experiment (GEMx), the largest airborne mineral-mapping campaign in U.S. history. The work supports the broader Earth MRI initiative, which aims to modernize the nation’s surface and subsurface maps to locate resources vital for energy, manufacturing and national security.

In its first year, AVIRIS-5 logged more than 200 flight hours over Nevada, California and other Western states. An early highlight was the detection of hectorite, a lithium-bearing clay, in the tailings of an abandoned California mine—one of many deposit types the USGS lists among 50 minerals considered critical due to supply-chain risk.

How It Sees Minerals

AVIRIS-5 delivers roughly twice the spatial resolution of its predecessor, resolving features as small as 30 centimeters from an altitude of about 11 miles. Each flight produces large 'image cubes' that combine imagery with detailed spectral data for every pixel, letting researchers match mineral signatures as reliably as fingerprints.

Technology And Heritage

The sensor builds on decades of Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) spectrometer development. Engineers at JPL's Microdevices Laboratory use prisms, gratings, detector arrays and advanced materials such as black silicon to reduce stray light and boost sensitivity. Hardware with this lineage has flown on missions to Mercury, Mars, Pluto and Titan; similar technologies are planned for future missions to Europa.

'The breadth of different questions you can take on with this technology is really exciting, from land management to snowpack water resources to wildfire risk,' said Dana Chadwick, an Earth system scientist at JPL. 'Critical minerals are just the beginning for AVIRIS-5.'

Why It Matters

Backed by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, GEMx is scheduled to run for four years. The program aims to help communities extract value from legacy mines, discover new mineral resources and identify environmental hazards such as acid mine drainage. For AVIRIS-5, lithium mapping is an early—and high-profile—example of how spectral imaging can transform how we observe and manage Earth.

Bottom line: AVIRIS-5 pairs high-altitude access with advanced spectroscopy to accelerate mineral discovery, environmental monitoring and resource planning—one spectral fingerprint at a time.