Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) Overview

Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC)

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched Terra, the Earth Observing System’s (EOS) flagship satellite platform on December 18, 1999. The polarorbiting Terra contains five remote sensing instruments, which enable the scientific study and analyses of global terrestrial processes and manifestations of global change. One of the five instruments is the multispectral Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), which is built in Japan by a consortium of government, industry, and research groups. It has three spectral bands in the visible near-infrared region (VNIR), six bands in the shortwave infrared region (SWIR), and five bands in the thermal infrared region (TIR), with 15-, 30-, and 90-meter ground resolutions, respectively. This combination of wide spectral coverage and high spatial resolution allows ASTER to discriminate among a wide variety of surface materials. The VNIR subsystem also has a backwardviewing telescope for high-resolution (15-meter) stereoscopic observation in the along-track direction, which facilitates the generation of digital elevation models (DEM).

The ASTER instrument is unique in two respects: it provides the highest spatial resolution surface spectral reflectance, temperature, and emissivity data of all the Terra sensors, and it is capable of being scheduled to fulfill on-demand data acquisition requests. The ASTER data products include surface reflectance, surface radiance, surface kinetic temperature, surface emissivity, brightness temperature at sensor, DEM, and orthorectified data. ASTER data contribute to a wide array of application areas, including geology and soils, vegetation and ecosystem dynamics, carbon cycling, hazards monitoring (volcanoes, wildfires, floods, landslides, and coastal erosion), land surface climatology, hydrology, and glaciology.

The ASTER Level-1B product is the staple input used to produce all on-demand geophysical products except the ASTER DEM. It offers the same number of bands at the same resolution as the Level-1A product and is created by applying the radiometric-calibration and geometric-correction coefficients to the Level-1A data. The Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC) archives and maintains ASTER Level-1A data received from the Ground Data System (GDS) in Japan. All higher-level ASTER data products are produced on-demand at the LP DAAC. A similar suite of products is produced at the GDS facility in Tokyo, Japan.

ASTER data and products are registered to the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) map projection and coordinate system. The majority of the data and products are provided in a specific implementation of the Hierarchical Data Format called HDF–EOS. For more details on ASTER data and its product suite, please visit https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/lpdaac/products/aster_products_table.The following table provides a list of all the ASTER Routine and On-Demand products available from the LP DAAC:

Resources on ASTER:

LP DAAC URL: https://lpdaac.usgs.gov Warehouse Inventory Search Tool URL: https://wist.echo.nasa.gov/~wist/api/imswelcome/index.html Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) ASTER URL: http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov LPDAAC–JPL ASTER User Handbook URL: http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/content/03_data/04_Documents/aster_user_guide_v2.pdf Ground Data System (GDS) in Japan URL: http://www.gds.aster.ersdac.or.jp/gds_www2002/index_e.html Area:

Acquisition date and time:

Image dimensions:

File size: Data Set Characteristics:

Approximately 60 x 60 kilometers

VNIR: 4,200 rows x 4,980 columns VNIR (3B): 4,600 rows x 4,980 columns SWIR: 2,100 rows x 2,490 columns TIR: 700 rows x 830 columns

VNIR (1,2,3N) = 62,748,000 bytes VNIR (3B) = 22,908,000 bytes Spatial resolution:

Projection:

Data format:

Contact Information:

LP DAAC User Services

Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center 47914 252nd Street Sioux Falls, SD, 57198–0001 Voice: 605–594–6116 Toll Free: 866–573–3222 (866–LPE–DAAC) Fax: 605–594–6963 E-mail: LPDAAC@eos.nasa.gov Web: https://LPDAAC.usgs.gov SWIR (4–9) = 31,374,000 bytes TIR (10–14) = 5,810,000 bytes Total = 118 megabytes

VNIR = 15 meters SWIR = 30 meters TIR = 90 meters

Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM)

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