GRSG Conference 2020 Presentation

Title: High spatial resolution hyperspectral mineral mapping over Cuprite, Nevada and Hope, British Columbia with Unmanned Aerial Systems

Author: Dean Riley 

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) represent a technical revolution is for mineral exploration and mine site operations. High spatial resolution digital photography, digital surface models, and visible-shortwave infrared (400 – 2500 nm) hyperspectral data, 3-10 cm GSD can be collected with UAS for mineral exploration and mine operations. We collected over 50 hectares of digital photography, digital surface models, and hyperspectral data at Cuprite, Nevada and Hope, British Columbia in 2020.

Hope, British Columbia is a porphyry copper deposit and Cuprite, Nevada is a barren high sulfidation epithermal system that each posed challenging operational conditions for collection of hyperspectral data that ranged from 410 to 2500 nm with about a 5 nm spectral resolution.

Digital photography has a 3 cm spatial resolution, the digital surface models have a 0.5 m resolution and the hyperspectral has a 10 cm spatial resolution.

Both cases show that operationally UAS surveys are reliable, efficient, and produce high spatial resolution and high spectral resolution data especially when processed with standard processing techniques for producing mineral and abundance maps from band ratios, linear unmixing, spectral correlation mapping and wavelength minimum mapping.