Written by Jeffrey Gillan

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Jointly managed by NASA and Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry

ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) is one of five imaging instruments flying on the Terra satellite launched in 1999 as part of NASA’s Earth Observing System. It is used to gather detailed data on surface temperature, emissivity, reflectance, and elevation at a relatively high spatial resolution. ASTER gathers data in 14 spectral bands: 3 visible and 11 in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. It has a nadir and backward facing Band 3 which gives it the unique ability to create digital elevation models based on stereo images. It has a revisit time of 16 days which can be a limitation for studying rapidly changing surface conditions. There might also be costs associated with acquiring some images.

Landsat Thematic Mapper 5 (TM5), Landsat Thematic Mapper 7 (TM7)

_{Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team}

These images of the San Francisco Bay region were acquired on March 3, 2000.

Upper Left: The color infrared composite uses bands in the visible and reflected infrared. Vegetation is red, urban areas are gray; sediment in the bays shows up as lighter shades of blue. Thanks to the 15 meter (50-foot) spatial resolution, shadows of the towers along the Bay Bridge can be seen.

Upper right: A composite of bands in the short wave infrared displays differences in soils and rocks in the mountainous areas. Even though these regions appear entirely vegetated in the visible, enough surface shows through openings in the vegetation to allow the ground to be imaged.

Lower left: This composite of multispectral thermal bands shows differences in urban materials in varying colors. Separation of materials is due to differences in thermal emission properties, analogous to colors in the visible.

Lower right: This is a color coded temperature image of water temperature, derived from the thermal bands. Warm waters are in white and yellow, colder waters are blue. Suisun Bay in the upper right is fed directly from the cold Sacramento River. As the water flows through San Pablo and San Francisco Bays on the way to the Pacific, the waters warm up

The ASTER sensor consists of three separate subsystems. ASTER has a sun-synchronous polar orbit meaning it crosses over any given latitude at the same time each day. The satellite revisits the same area every 16 days.

Unlike the Landsat program that acquires and archives all images, ASTER provides images on-demand and will only gather data on an area if a request has been submitted. Pre-existing ASTER images are archived and available through the Reverb/Echo system http://reverb.echo.nasa.gov/reverb/#utf8=%E2%9C%93&spatial_map=satellite&spatial_type=rectangle or the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LPDAAC) Data Pool https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/get_data/data_pool. A suite of products at different processing levels are available through these two sources. All existing level 1B products through the Data Pool are available at no cost. Higher processes products may have costs involved.

If your area of interest has not been archived or acquired yet, please click here http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/NewReq.asp for instructions on how to request an image acquisition.

ASTER images typically come in a HDF-EOS file format but can be converted to Geotiff files in several projections.Tools for carrying out data transformations can be found at: https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/tools.

• Heine et al (2007) used ASTER imagery to create land cover maps to assess the condition of high altitude pastures
• Phillips and Beeri (2008) used ASTER and Landsat images to estimate net ecosystem exchange in the Northern Great Plains
• Garcia et al (2008) used surface temperature and reflectance from ASTER images to study land degradation risk in a semi-arid region of Spain
• Hewson et al (2008) used thermal ASTER imagery to extract soil textural information

Java is required for viewing and selecting data in the LPDAAC Data Pool.

ASTER images can be converted into GeoTiff format making is compatible with ESRI ArcGIS and other GIS platforms. The images can be manipulated and processed in remote sensing software packages such as ENVI and ERDAS Imagine.

• ASTER Mission http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/
• Nasa’s Earth Observing System http://eospso.gsfc.nasa.gov/
• Japan ASTER Ground Data System http://gds.aster.ersdac.jspacesystems.or.jp/gds_www2002/exhibition_e/a_gds_e/set_a_gds_e.html
• ASTER Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Spaceborne_Thermal_Emission_and_Reflection_Radiometer

• Garcia, Monica, Cecilio Oyonarte, Luis Villagarcia, Sergio Contreras, Francisco Domingo, Juan Puigdefabregas (2008), Monitoring land degradation risk using ASTER data: The non-evaporative fraction as an indicator of ecosystem function, Remote Sensing of the Environment, Vol. 12, pp. 3720-3736.

• Heine, Erwin, Monika Kriechbaum, and Franz Suppan (2007), Assessment of the condition of the high altitude pastures in south Tibet supported by land cover maps derived from Aster Satellite Data, 9th International Symposium on High Mountain Remote Sensing Cartography, pp. 193-200.

• Hewson, R. D., G. R. Taylor, and L. W. Whitborn (2008), Application of TIR imagery and spectroscopy for the extraction of soil textural information at Fowlers Gap, Western New South Wales, Australia, unpublished report, IEEE International Geoscience & Remote Sensing Symposium.

• Jenson, John R. (2007), Remote Sensing of the Environment: An Earth resource perspective, second edition, Prentice Hall series in geographic information science, Upper Saddle River, NJ.

• Phillips, Rebecca L. and Ofer Beeri (2008), Scaling-up knowledge of growing-season net ecosystem exchange for long-term assessment of North Dakota grasslands under the Conservation Reserve Program, Global Change Biology, Vol. 14, pp. 1008-1017.

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