Statistical exploration and volume reduction of planetary remote sensing spectral data

Abstract

Modern planetary scientific experiments are providing a huge amount of information that requires extensive analysis and evaluation in order to understand its scientific content. In this work we evaluate the ability of a previously developed and evaluated technique to explore a large data set in order to identify the cluster representatives of the spectral variability of a selected Martian region and obtain a reduction of the original data volume ∼2 × 104. We also demonstrate that the cluster centroids are able to quantitatively reproduce previously interpreted atmospheric, topographic, and compositional properties. The results build additional confidence in the application of the statistical techniques. Copyright 2008 by the American Geophysical Union.