WHAT CAN THERMAL INFRARED REMOTE SENSING OF TERRESTRIAL VOLCANOES TELL US ABOUT PROCESSES PAST AND PRESENT ON MARS?

Over the past several decades there has been a wide array of thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing data acquired from the orbits of Earth and Mars. These have varied in spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions and been critical for interpreting volcanic processes from active monitoring of flows and plumes on Earth to mapping compositional diversity on Mars. Furthermore, advances in high-resolution, low-cost, ground and laboratory TIR instrumentation have opened up new avenues of synergistic science where combined with the orbital datasets. These studies have also served as terrestrial analogues that provide important insights for interpreting the geologic processes that have operated in other planetary environments. We will focus this talk on higher resolution TIR data from laboratory, ground and orbital instruments. We have used these combined datasets to model the eruption rate and progression of active flows, monitor hazards from active lava domes, and map the compositional/textural diversity of pyroclastic flows. For example, near real time monitoring of the time averaged discharge rate of a lava flow combined with accurate models of the terrain and lava cooling can predict the flow length with reasonable accuracy. That process can be inverted for Mars to better understand the eruption conditions responsible for these flows. TIR data can also be used to derive thermal inertia, a measure of a material’s resistance to temperature change over the diurnal cycle. This approach is now being used to decouple dust/ash mantling from the underlying lava to probe its compositional changes. In summary, the long history of terrestrial TIR data analysis can now be adapted to interpret volcanic processes that have operated on the Red Planet.