GALILEO NIMS SPECTRAL IMAGE CUBES: JUPITER OPERATIONS

The natural form of imaging spectrometer data is the spectral image cube. It is normally in band sequential format, but has a dual nature. It is a series of 'images' of the target, each in a different wavelength, in ascending order. It is also a set of spectra, each at a particular line and sample, over the target area. Each spectrum describes a small portion of the area. When transformed into cubes, the data may be analyzed spatially, an image at a time, or spectrally, a spectrum at a time, or in more complex spatial-spectral fashion.