60,000 feet above Earth, NASA is hunting for the minerals that power phones, EVs and clean energy

A view from the driver's side window of a car shows a white plane on the runway where the driver's hand shows a thumbs up on the left side of the image.

NASA has a new high-tech sensor to help the search for critical minerals in the American West.

The sensor is called AVIRIS-5 (Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-5), and it comes from technology developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) back in the 1970s. About the size of a microwave, AVIRIS-5 fits inside the nose of one of NASA's ER-2 high-altitude research aircraft. The sensor's first iteration was employed in 1986, and JPL has worked to improve it ever since.