One of the most exciting geoscience websites that you can find is hosted by Arizona State University in Tempe.  It centres on the capture of thermally emitted infrared radiation from the Martian surface by the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) aboard NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter (http://themis.asu.edu). The opening ‘splash’ features thermal images gathered on the fly by THEMIS, as if you were peering down from the spacecraft as it orbits the planet. The movies are not really live, but about 2 weeks old. Nevertheless, they have a hypnotic appeal as one waits to see what is going to turn up – mainly small craters, but sometimes oddities such as the strange terrain of the northern Tharsis Basin that is a tangle of extensional faults that might well be on the floor of the Afar Depression in north-eastern Ethiopia. THEMIS acquires data in several thermal wavelengths, and this is its scientific importance: the multiple channels span the very different emission spectra of silicate minerals.

Using different thermal bands to control the red, green and blue colour guns of a video monitor produces vivid images that are colour-coded for a variety of rock compositions. The great advantage of thermal sensing is that it works at night as well as during the day.  So THEMIS images can also tell us a great deal about the way in which rocks heat up and cool, which is another clue to their composition.  Having no clouds – there are seasonal dust storms – Mars can be mapped in great geological detail without geologists having to traipse across space and the inhospitable Martian surface.  All that a human touch could add would be to bring back some rock samples for geochemists to get their teeth stuck into. What those rock are – basalts, andesites and various sediments – is already becoming known in greater detail than for huge tracts of the Earth’s surface.  Fortunately, a sister instrument to THEMIS, called ASTER does orbit the Earth to deploy a similar multispectral thermal imaging system.  What is hugely annoying is that the Martian data are 5 times sharper than those of the infinitely more interesting Earth.  Yet again, NASA has priorities that that are far from those of most of humanity.  One excuse regularly given for better resolution from other planets is that of security issues for Earth images….