Current Science

Prakash Chauhan ¹, Prabhjot Kaur ¹, N. Srivastava ², Rishitosh K. Sinha ², Nirmala Jain ¹, S. V. S. Murty ²

Affiliations
1 Space Applications Centre, (ISRO), Ahmedabad 380 015, IN
2 Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad 380 009, IN

Abstract

Space exploration missions of planetary bodies in our solar system have provided new insights to understand their formation and evolutionary processes that such bodies have undergone leading to their current geological state. Remote sensing from orbiter mission has helped in identifying surface features, delineating surface topography, mapping surface composition and deriving reliable age estimates of different planetary surfaces. In particular, high spatial and spectral resolution spacecraft observations have significantly contributed to our current understanding of the geological, physical and chemical processes that resulted in divergent evolutionary paths undertaken by different planetary objects such as inner and outer planets, dwarf planets, the moons and small solar system bodies (asteroids and comets). Hyperspectral remote sensing has been an emerging field of space-based reflectance spectroscopy and in recent years many imaging spectroscopy instruments have flown on different planetary missions, e.g. Moon Mineralogy Mapper on-board Chandrayaan-1, VIMS on Cassini mission, CRISM on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) mission, etc. This article provides a review on imaging reflectance spectroscopy for understanding the surface composition through mineralogy for different planetary bodies.

Keywords

Hyperspectral Remote Sensing, Mineralogy, Planetary Surfaces, Solar Systems.

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Prabhjot Kaur ¹

Affiliations
1 Centre of Battery Engineering and Electric Vehicles, Telecom Centre of Excellence, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600 041, IN

Abstract

With over one billion homes in the world living off-grid, and over half a billion with poor grid, Governments and different levels of national and international organizations have been trying to electrify these homes with newer targets set every year. While rooftop solar was an obvious choice for powering such decentralized and difficult locations, this was not being implemented; DC power of the renewables and batteries was not directly exploited and converted to conventional AC power, resulting in large losses and inefficiencies.

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