EXPLOITATION OF THE FUTURE SPACE THERMAL MISSIONS FOR POTENTIAL GEOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS

Satellite thermal images have been using for several years in geological suites research fields. During the last two decades, much progress has been done in remote sensing techniques, and further substantive developments are expected over the next few years also considering the new space missions: incoming ESA Sentinel satellites, last launched NASA Landsat-9, planned NASA-SBG, ASI Platino missions and other mission studies that include thermal infrared sensors. The SBG-TIR mission could be considered a very performant successor of the TIR missions such as ASTER (from 1999 on Terra satellite) and ECOSTRESS (from 2018 onboard ISS). Concerning geological suites applications, we envisage for the TIR multispectral data set, also in synergy with SWIR hyperspectral, two potential applications: raw material (e.g. metamorphic silica formations like serpentine) and topsoil characteristics retrieval (texture and SOC). In this context we intend to explore LST and emissivity data set, derived from ECOSTRESS data set or resampled from airborne TASI-600 surveys, to envisage the SBG-TIR potential within this thematic framework.