Date of Award

Spring 2025

Project Type

Thesis

Program or Major

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Degree Name

Master of Science

First Advisor

Jennifer M Jacobs

Second Advisor

Julie Paprocki

Third Advisor

Jacob Buffo

Abstract

Hypersaline lakes and playas in arid environments on Earth can serve as analogs for paleolake environments of interest on Mars because the hydrated compounds within these systems indicate the presence of ancient hydrologic networks and display strong relationships with microbial life. Traditional orbital observations map these compounds at spatial resolutions ranging from tens to hundreds of meters per pixel. This study uses in-situ measurements, Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS) hyperspectral mapping (10 cm), and EnMAP satellite hyperspectral mapping (30 m) to map heterogeneous mineralogical assemblages in hypersaline lakes in Southcentral British Columbia, Canada (BC). We tested the ability of high-resolution UAS hyperspectral mapping to identify hydrated compounds within these hypersaline lakes. The hyperspectral UAS classifications had a 92% agreement with ground spectrometer (ASD) classifications and 100% agreement with X-ray diffractometer (XRD) mineral identifications from in-situ samples. UAS and ASD percent confidence and XRD target compound concentration values also agreed well, indicating that the UAS can map the target compounds' relative abundances across the lakes’ surface. ENMAP hyperspectral imagery was able to differentiate the hypersaline lakes from the surrounding area but was not able to capture individual compounds, relative abundance, or spatial variability within the lakes. The distribution of hydrated compounds was strongly related to physical features within the lakes. When the features were mapped using UAS lidar surveys, there was a strong correlation between the target compound distributions and the lakes’ physical features, further linking the chemistry to the geomorphology of these systems. The multiscale mapping procedure suggests that UAS hyperspectral mapping is a valuable method for characterizing the surface mineralogy of astrobiologically relevant environments because spatial and spectral resolutions beyond the current capabilities of orbital imagery can be achieved

Download

Share

COinS