Equipped with rock picks and hand lenses, a team of geoscientists deployed to the Mojave Desert recently to investigate a tantalizing “fingerprint” detected by a NASA sensor. Their target: a cache of topaz hiding in plain sight.

The geologists weren’t searching for gem-grade treasure. Rather, the presence of topaz could hint at a more valuable deposit below of something known as porphyry copper.

One of the world’s primary sources of copper, these deposits are left behind when magma and hot water from deep underground course through Earth’s crust, chemically transforming the surrounding rock. This tends to occur where one tectonic plate dives below another, known as a subduction zone, such as the North American Cordillera, which stretches from the Canadian Rockies to western Mexico.

In addition to copper — the third most used metal in the world after steel and aluminum — the deposits can hold other critical minerals like molybdenum and tellurium, which are used in everything from steelmaking to solar panels. Finding the deposits isn’t easy. Geologists look for topaz because it forms under the same volcanic conditions.

For the team in the Mojave, the goal was to collect more evidence. That would require boots on the ground and a heavy bag of samples. The scientists who converged on the site included three experts from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and Robert Green of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

“What we’re doing out here is geologic CSI,” said Green, referring to the investigative TV show, as he split open a weathered red rock to expose a sparkling core. “We’re looking for clues to reconstruct what happened here.”

Next-generation mineral mapping

The sensor that detected the topaz deposit on public land near Barstow, California, was built at JPL. Called AVIRIS, short for Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer, it analyzes reflected sunlight and can be used to identify chemicals and minerals by their unique spectral fingerprint. The technology was pioneered in the early 1980s by a team that included Green, and space-hardened versions have explored the Moon, Mars, and other rocky bodies in the solar system in the decades since.

While its cousins study distant worlds aboard spacecraft, the AVIRIS line of sensors is advancing Earth science from aircraft. The latest model, AVIRIS-5, recently took to the skies for the first time as part of the NASA-USGS Geologic Earth Mapping Experiment (GEMx). The goal of GEMx is to identify sources of critical minerals across the American West, including in the waste rock of active and legacy mines. It is led by the USGS as part of its larger, nationwide initiative.

Since 2023, GEMx flights have covered more than 386,000 square miles (1 million square kilometers) of American soil, including most of California.

Ground-truthing the sensor data can entail hot field work, scrambling over steep crags to uncover samples for lab analysis. While testing has confirmed the topaz discovery, determining if the Mojave site overlies a porphyry copper deposit will require intensive investigation using ground-penetrating equipment. But the AVIRIS finding shows how advanced NASA airborne sensing can help lead geologists to the metaphorical needle in a haystack, even in heavily explored Southern California.

“People have been prospecting this area for generations,” said Erik Tharalson, a USGS geologist. “But there’s a lot more to discover.”

High flyer

From the beginning, the GEMx mineral mapping campaign has been enabled by one of the highest-flying aircraft in NASA’s fleet: the ER‑2. It deployed on March 31 from NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, to Colorado Springs Airport in Colorado.

“We deployed to Colorado Springs to maximize flight time for data collection needed in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas,” said John McGrath, ER‑2 project manager at NASA Armstrong.

By the conclusion of this deployment on June 5, the aircraft had completed 26 flights totaling more than 125 hours. Soaring at about 65,000 feet, the ER-2 can fly at high altitudes that allow it to collect broad‑area, high‑resolution spectral measurements in a single pass, supporting researchers studying mineral composition and surface processes.

In 2025, the aircraft flew 36 science missions, collecting more than 7 billion measurements over 200 flight hours. The data has contributed to the largest airborne surface mineralogy dataset gathered in a single NASA-USGS campaign.

The GEMx survey is led and funded by the USGS Earth Mapping Resources Initiative. Earth MRI is modernizing mapping the nation’s surface and subsurface to find new, critical, and other minerals. It is a partnership effort with 45 state geological surveys, federal agencies, private industry, tribes, universities, and others. The initiative will capitalize on both the technology developed by NASA for spectroscopic imaging, as well as the USGS expertise in analyzing the datasets, conducting field work, and deriving critical mineral information from them.

To learn more about GEMx visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/gemx/

Media Contacts

Andrew Wang / Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-379-6874 / 818-393-2433
andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

Written by Sally Younger

2026-037

The post NASA, USGS Scientists Go Rock Hounding in California’s High Desert appeared first on NASA Science.

Equipped with rock picks and hand lenses, a team of geoscientists deployed to the Mojave Desert recently to investigate a tantalizing “fingerprint” detected by a NASA sensor. Their target: a cache of topaz hiding in plain sight.

The geologists weren’t searching for gem-grade treasure. Rather, the presence of topaz could hint at a more valuable deposit below of something known as porphyry copper.

One of the world’s primary sources of copper, these deposits are left behind when magma and hot water from deep underground course through Earth’s crust, chemically transforming the surrounding rock. This tends to occur where one tectonic plate dives below another, known as a subduction zone, such as the North American Cordillera, which stretches from the Canadian Rockies to western Mexico.

In addition to copper — the third most used metal in the world after steel and aluminum — the deposits can hold other critical minerals like molybdenum and tellurium, which are used in everything from steelmaking to solar panels. Finding the deposits isn’t easy. Geologists look for topaz because it forms under the same volcanic conditions.

For the team in the Mojave, the goal was to collect more evidence. That would require boots on the ground and a heavy bag of samples. The scientists who converged on the site included three experts from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and Robert Green of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

“What we’re doing out here is geologic CSI,” said Green, referring to the investigative TV show, as he split open a weathered red rock to expose a sparkling core. “We’re looking for clues to reconstruct what happened here.”

Next-generation mineral mapping

The sensor that detected the topaz deposit on public land near Barstow, California, was built at JPL. Called AVIRIS, short for Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer, it analyzes reflected sunlight and can be used to identify chemicals and minerals by their unique spectral fingerprint. The technology was pioneered in the early 1980s by a team that included Green, and space-hardened versions have explored the Moon, Mars, and other rocky bodies in the solar system in the decades since.

While its cousins study distant worlds aboard spacecraft, the AVIRIS line of sensors is advancing Earth science from aircraft. The latest model, AVIRIS-5, recently took to the skies for the first time as part of the NASA-USGS Geologic Earth Mapping Experiment (GEMx). The goal of GEMx is to identify sources of critical minerals across the American West, including in the waste rock of active and legacy mines. It is led by the USGS as part of its larger, nationwide initiative.

Since 2023, GEMx flights have covered more than 386,000 square miles (1 million square kilometers) of American soil, including most of California.

Ground-truthing the sensor data can entail hot field work, scrambling over steep crags to uncover samples for lab analysis. While testing has confirmed the topaz discovery, determining if the Mojave site overlies a porphyry copper deposit will require intensive investigation using ground-penetrating equipment. But the AVIRIS finding shows how advanced NASA airborne sensing can help lead geologists to the metaphorical needle in a haystack, even in heavily explored Southern California.

“People have been prospecting this area for generations,” said Erik Tharalson, a USGS geologist. “But there’s a lot more to discover.”

High flyer

From the beginning, the GEMx mineral mapping campaign has been enabled by one of the highest-flying aircraft in NASA’s fleet: the ER‑2. It deployed on March 31 from NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, to Colorado Springs Airport in Colorado.

“We deployed to Colorado Springs to maximize flight time for data collection needed in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas,” said John McGrath, ER‑2 project manager at NASA Armstrong.

By the conclusion of this deployment on June 5, the aircraft had completed 26 flights totaling more than 125 hours. Soaring at about 65,000 feet, the ER-2 can fly at high altitudes that allow it to collect broad‑area, high‑resolution spectral measurements in a single pass, supporting researchers studying mineral composition and surface processes.

In 2025, the aircraft flew 36 science missions, collecting more than 7 billion measurements over 200 flight hours. The data has contributed to the largest airborne surface mineralogy dataset gathered in a single NASA-USGS campaign.

The GEMx survey is led and funded by the USGS Earth Mapping Resources Initiative. Earth MRI is modernizing mapping the nation’s surface and subsurface to find new, critical, and other minerals. It is a partnership effort with 45 state geological surveys, federal agencies, private industry, tribes, universities, and others. The initiative will capitalize on both the technology developed by NASA for spectroscopic imaging, as well as the USGS expertise in analyzing the datasets, conducting field work, and deriving critical mineral information from them.

To learn more about GEMx visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/gemx/

Media Contacts

Andrew Wang / Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-379-6874 / 818-393-2433
andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

Written by Sally Younger

2026-037

A compact, multifrequency radar built by a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will make it easier to collect information about dynamic cloud systems. Called CloudCube, this new instrument simultaneously probes the atmosphere with three radar signals, spanning 36 to 240 GHz, for optimized sensitivity to a wide range of water droplet and ice particle sizes. 

Built with funding from NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office Instrument Incubator Program, CloudCube transmits and receives Ka-, W-, and G-band signals, making it the first compact radar system capable of simultaneously probing meteorological targets at wavelengths spanning approximately one to ten millimeters. Researchers will be able to combine information from the three signals to learn more about the initiation and evolution of precipitation, as well as cloud microphysics and radiative properties.

“We’re making a low-power, low-mass instrument to facilitate new cost-efficient missions for atmospheric observations. Building a multi-frequency radar, especially at G-band, is very novel,” said Raquel Rodriguez Monje, a systems engineer at JPL and principal investigator for CloudCube.

Each of CloudCube’s three signals observes a different element of cloud physics. Ka-band radar signals are ideal for collecting precipitation profiles; W-band radar signals are preferred for measuring cloud particles that give rise to precipitation; and G-band radar signals, which have never been collected from a space-based instrument, are ideal for measuring ice and liquid water content inside very light clouds (a paper describing this measurement can be found here).

Probing the atmosphere simultaneously with three signals allows researchers to collect data on all these cloud features at once, which is valuable for improving weather forecasts and especially climate modeling. CloudCube leverages innovations in millimeter-wave hardware to pack three radar modules–one for each signal–within a single compact system.

One CloudCube innovation concerns the specialized components required to transmit G-band power from a compact, low-power instrument. The detection of cloud signals requires high transmit power, which CloudCube achieves by combining the outputs of multiple high-efficiency frequency-multiplication devices that allow the instrument to generate hundreds of milliWatts at 240 GHz. Another innovation of CloudCube is that it was designed to use as few radio frequency components as possible to reduce its mass and power consumption, which could lower the cost of future Earth-observing orbital instruments.

Flying an instrument equipped with G-band radar in space will be a new capability and will allow researchers to achieve greater spatial resolution and sensitivity in the study of cloud microphysical processes.

“Basically, we’re weighing clouds using these combinations of frequencies in a way that we couldn’t do before we had the G-band,” said Matt Lebsock, a researcher at JPL and co-investigator for CloudCube.

The instrument has been tested in the field. A ground-based prototype of CloudCube’s G-band channel operated continuously for 11 months during the Department of Energy’s Cloud and Precipitation Experiment at Kennaook (CAPE-K) campaign. CloudCube also participated in the Eastern Pacific Cloud Aerosol Precipitation Experiment, a ground campaign sponsored by the Department of Energy. A paper describing the results of that experiment can be found here.

Most recently, CloudCube successfully operated all three frequency bands from NASA’s Gulfstream III aircraft and collected its first airborne observations of snowfall as part of the North American Upstream Feature-Resolving and Tropopause Uncertainty Reconnaissance Experiment campaign—a NASA-funded campaign designed to improve forecasts of high-impact winter weather. The CloudCube team is currently calibrating and processing the data for public release.

For additional details, see the entry for this project on NASA TechPort.

Project Lead: Dr. Raquel Rodriguez Monje, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Sponsoring Organization: NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office Instrument Incubation Program

A compact, multifrequency radar built by a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will make it easier to collect information about dynamic cloud systems. Called CloudCube, this new instrument simultaneously probes the atmosphere with three radar signals, spanning 36 to 240 GHz, for optimized sensitivity to a wide range of water droplet and ice particle sizes. 

Built with funding from NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office Instrument Incubator Program, CloudCube transmits and receives Ka-, W-, and G-band signals, making it the first compact radar system capable of simultaneously probing meteorological targets at wavelengths spanning approximately one to ten millimeters. Researchers will be able to combine information from the three signals to learn more about the initiation and evolution of precipitation, as well as cloud microphysics and radiative properties.

“We’re making a low-power, low-mass instrument to facilitate new cost-efficient missions for atmospheric observations. Building a multi-frequency radar, especially at G-band, is very novel,” said Raquel Rodriguez Monje, a systems engineer at JPL and principal investigator for CloudCube.

Each of CloudCube’s three signals observes a different element of cloud physics. Ka-band radar signals are ideal for collecting precipitation profiles; W-band radar signals are preferred for measuring cloud particles that give rise to precipitation; and G-band radar signals, which have never been collected from a space-based instrument, are ideal for measuring ice and liquid water content inside very light clouds (a paper describing this measurement can be found here).

Probing the atmosphere simultaneously with three signals allows researchers to collect data on all these cloud features at once, which is valuable for improving weather forecasts and especially climate modeling. CloudCube leverages innovations in millimeter-wave hardware to pack three radar modules–one for each signal–within a single compact system.

One CloudCube innovation concerns the specialized components required to transmit G-band power from a compact, low-power instrument. The detection of cloud signals requires high transmit power, which CloudCube achieves by combining the outputs of multiple high-efficiency frequency-multiplication devices that allow the instrument to generate hundreds of milliWatts at 240 GHz. Another innovation of CloudCube is that it was designed to use as few radio frequency components as possible to reduce its mass and power consumption, which could lower the cost of future Earth-observing orbital instruments.

Flying an instrument equipped with G-band radar in space will be a new capability and will allow researchers to achieve greater spatial resolution and sensitivity in the study of cloud microphysical processes.

“Basically, we’re weighing clouds using these combinations of frequencies in a way that we couldn’t do before we had the G-band,” said Matt Lebsock, a researcher at JPL and co-investigator for CloudCube.

The instrument has been tested in the field. A ground-based prototype of CloudCube’s G-band channel operated continuously for 11 months during the Department of Energy’s Cloud and Precipitation Experiment at Kennaook (CAPE-K) campaign. CloudCube also participated in the Eastern Pacific Cloud Aerosol Precipitation Experiment, a ground campaign sponsored by the Department of Energy. A paper describing the results of that experiment can be found here.

Most recently, CloudCube successfully operated all three frequency bands from NASA’s Gulfstream III aircraft and collected its first airborne observations of snowfall as part of the North American Upstream Feature-Resolving and Tropopause Uncertainty Reconnaissance Experiment campaign—a NASA-funded campaign designed to improve forecasts of high-impact winter weather. The CloudCube team is currently calibrating and processing the data for public release.

For additional details, see the entry for this project on NASA TechPort.

Project Lead: Dr. Raquel Rodriguez Monje, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Sponsoring Organization: NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office Instrument Incubation Program

The post NASA’s CloudCube Pioneers Miniaturized Radar to Study Clouds, Precipitation appeared first on NASA Science.

Not quite halfway through a six-year sojourn through the Solar System, a NASA spacecraft used a close encounter with Mars last week as a dress rehearsal for its arrival at the Solar System's largest metal asteroid in 2029.

The Psyche mission launched more than two-and-a-half years ago, in October 2023, from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to kick off a journey of some 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion km) to reach its unexplored namesake, the asteroid Psyche. The robotic research mission got an initial lift from a powerful SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. It uses plasma engines to gradually build up the impulse needed to reach its destination in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

A flyby of Mars last Friday gave the spacecraft its most significant boost since launch. Navigators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California set up the spacecraft for a course taking it 2,864 miles (4,609 km) from the Martian surface, well above the planet's tenuous atmosphere. Psyche used Martian gravity like a slingshot to gain enough speed to reshape its orbit around the Sun, putting the probe on a path to intercept its asteroid target.

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© NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Not quite halfway through a six-year sojourn through the Solar System, a NASA spacecraft used a close encounter with Mars last week as a dress rehearsal for its arrival at the Solar System's largest metal asteroid in 2029.

The Psyche mission launched more than two-and-a-half years ago, in October 2023, from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to kick off a journey of some 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion km) to reach its unexplored namesake, the asteroid Psyche. The robotic research mission got an initial lift from a powerful SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. It uses plasma engines to gradually build up the impulse needed to reach its destination in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

A flyby of Mars last Friday gave the spacecraft its most significant boost since launch. Navigators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California set up the spacecraft for a course taking it 2,864 miles (4,609 km) from the Martian surface, well above the planet's tenuous atmosphere. Psyche used Martian gravity like a slingshot to gain enough speed to reshape its orbit around the Sun, putting the probe on a path to intercept its asteroid target.

Read full article

Comments

© NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU