Principal components analysis of Mars in the near-infrared

Abstract

Principal components analysis and target transformation are applied to near-infrared image cubes of Mars in a study to disentangle the spectra into a small number of spectral endmembers and characterize the spectral information. The image cubes are ground-based telescopic data from the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility during the 1995 and 1999 near-aphelion oppositions when ice clouds were plentiful [ Clancy, R.T., Grossman, A.W., Wolff, M.J., James, P.B., Rudy, D.J., Billawala, Y.N., Sandor, B.J., Lee, S.W., Muhleman, D.O., 1996. Icarus 122, 36–62; Wolff, M.J., Clancy, R.T., Whitney, B.A., Christensen, P.R., Pearl, J.C., 1999b. In: The Fifth International Conference on Mars, July 19–24, 1999, Pasadena, CA, pp. 6173], and the 2003 near-perihelion opposition when ice clouds are generally limited to topographically high regions (volcano cap clouds) but airborne dust is more common [ Martin, L.J., Zurek, R.W., 1993. J. Geophys. Res. 98 (E2), 3221–3246]. The heart of the technique is to transform the data into a vector space along the dimensions of greatest spectral variance and then choose endmembers based on these new “trait” dimensions. This is done through a target transformation technique, comparing linear combinations of the principal components to a mineral spectral library. In general Mars can be modeled, on the whole, with only three spectral endmembers which account for almost 99% of the data variance. This is similar to results in the thermal infrared with Mars Global Surveyor Thermal Emission Spectrometer data [Bandfield, J.L., Hamilton, V.E., Christensen, P.R., 2000. Science 287, 1626–1630]. The globally recovered surface endmembers can be used as inputs to radiative transfer modeling in order to measure ice abundance in martian clouds [Klassen, D.R., Bell III, J.F., 2002. Bull. Am. Astron. Soc. 34, 865] and a preliminary test of this technique is also presented.