How NASA Uses Light to Detect Waste From Mines

Indiziert: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]What we're seeing here is water contaminated with sulfuric acid and toxic metals.

[00:00:05]Better known as acid mine drainage.

[00:00:08]And there are thousands of abandoned mines scattered across the American West, each with the potential to release contaminated water into vital rivers, lakes and water supplies.

[00:00:19]Now, NASA instruments are providing a crucial solution.

[00:00:23]By mapping surface minerals from space, they can identify the exact regions in need of remediation.

[00:00:30]But first, a bit of a science lesson.

[00:00:32]The process of acid mine drainage is when rocks that have been underground get dug up and exposed to the surface. When they're exposed to the surface, they are now subject to getting rained on.

[00:00:43]So they're exposed to water, they're exposed to air.

[00:00:46]And in that process, they actually convert that water that is flowing over them into much more acidic waters.

[00:00:53]And they also can release toxic metals.

[00:00:56]Now certain types of rocks do experience this kind of weathering naturally.

[00:01:00]However, this process unfolds much slower since rocks make their way to the Earth's surface over incredibly long timescales.

[00:01:08]But when we extract the minerals needed to power our technologies, these rocks are pulled to the surface at a much faster rate.

[00:01:15]And so we really expedite a lot of that weathering in that process.

[00:01:19]There are an estimated 50,000 mines across the American West that have yet to be assessed for remediation.

[00:01:25]And, can be very expensive to do so on the ground.

[00:01:28]ROCKET LAUNCH SOUNDS Launched in 2022, NASA's EMIT instrument is an imaging spectrometer, a NASA invention that is used to measure light that is both in the visible and infrared wavelengths.

[00:01:40]An imaging spectrometer is basically kind of like a really fancy camera.

[00:01:44]CLICK So your camera has a red, green, and blue channel. And those are often really broad channels. But light is a continuum, And it reflects at all these different wavelenghts.

[00:01:54]And so if you can measure them in narrower and narrower intervals, You get more and more information about exactly how light is interacting with the chemical surface and the properties of whatever it is that it’s reflecting off of.

[00:02:08]By using spectroscopy, instruments like EMIT can map large regions to detect mineral compositions indicative of acid mine drainage and its sources. And it's not just for rocks and minerals.

[00:02:20]Spectroscopy can be used to greatly broaden our understanding of our world.

[00:02:25]It’s like a Swiss Army knife.

[00:02:27]There are so many things that people can use it for.

[00:02:29]We are doing things where people are looking at waste water, people are looking at surface plastics and agriculture.

[00:02:34]People are looking at crop types and thinking about yields.

[00:02:37]And as with all NASA data, this information is free and open to the public.

[00:02:43]And so we are, we really encourage people to check them out and think about, you know, how they might want to be leveraging them for a variety of, of different activities.

[00:06:48]Now, certain types of rocks do experience this kind of weathering naturally.

[00:06:53]However, this process unfolds much slower since rocks make their way to the Earth's surface over incredibly long timescales.

[00:07:04]And with that expedites a lot of the weathering in the process.

[00:08:49]What we're seeing here is water contaminated with sulfuric acid and toxic metals.

[00:08:54]Better known as acid mine drainage.