Onboard Detection of Active Canadian Sulfur Springs: A Europa Analogue

We discuss a current, ongoing demonstration of insitu onboard detection in which the Earth Observing-1 spacecraft detects surface sulfur deposits that originate from underlying springs by distinguishing the sulfur from the ice-rich glacial background, a good analogue for the Europan surface. In this paper, we describe the process of developing the onboard classifier for detecting the presence of sulfur in a hyperspectral scene, including the use of a training/testing set that is not exhaustively labeled, i.e. not all true positives are marked, and the selection of 12, out of 242, Hyperion instrument wavelength bands to use in the onboard detector. This study aims to demonstrate the potential for future missions to capture short-lived science events, make decisions onboard, identify high priority data for downlink and perform onboard change detection. In the future, such capability could help maximize the science return of downlink bandwidth-limited missions, addressing a significant constraint in all deep-space missions.