Novel quantitative methods to enable multispectral identification of high-purity water ice exposures on Mars using High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) images

Reliable detection and characterization of water ice on the Martian surface is pivotal to not only understand its present and past climate, but to also provide valuable information on in-situ resource availability and distribution for future human exploration missions. Ice-rich features are currently identified with visible/near-IR (VNIR), thermal IR and radar data. However, their coarse spatial scale sometimes limits confident characterization of small (i.e., meter-scale) icy exposures resulting from recent activity like new impacts. Water ice bearing materials possess weaker spectral characteristics at wavelengths shorter than ∼1030 nm that may be resolved by VNIR imaging instruments like the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and the Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS). Our study assesses the spectral capability of HiRISE colour observations to help distinguish high purity water ice exposures from ice-poor materials. We report detailed methodologies for reliable colour characterization of icy surface using unfiltered HiRISE images. We present the first quantitative approach to uniquely characterize high-purity ice-rich materials through spectral shape and spectral parameterization methods at high spatial resolution (∼50 cm/pixel). We also present three spectral parameters to aid detection of pure water ice features, while also providing statistical constraints to enable a quantitative interpretation scheme. Our methods are observed to work well in characterizing and separating ice-rich features uniquely from ice-poor and ferrous materials. However, we do observe that these methods have a lower grain size detection limit of ∼250–300 μm, and may not be able to uniquely separate frosts from ground ice exposures. We also apply these methods to better constrain the composition of bright materials exposed by recent impacts identified in previous surveys, where substantial evidence for ice-bearing materials was previously unavailable. Overall, our work proposes HiRISE colour-based methods as a novel approach for high-resolution multispectral characterization of ice-rich features on the Martian surface, which is of particular value since the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) has ceased operations.