This two year collaborative project was established in July 2006 with the overall aim of developing, validating, evaluating and delivering a suite of publicly available, pre-competitive mineral mapping products from airborne HyMap hyperspectral imagery and satellite multispectral ASTER imagery. Moreover, it was important to establish whether these mineral maps would complement other precompetitive geological and geophysical data and provide valuable new information for enhanced mineral exploration by the Australian resources community.

The project was in several parts, including:
- Generating a suite of 15 mineral group maps of the Mount Isa Block (~500K km2) from satellite multispectral ASTER imagery (~140 scenes);
- Stage 1 (2006-2007): acquisition and generation of a suite of 22 mineral abundance and mineral composition maps derived from airborne HyMap hyperspectral imagery (88 flight-lines) covering five structural/mineralised corridors (each about 15 km wide and 50 km long and covering 8250 km2 ) across the Mount Isa Block;
- Stage 2 (2007-2008): acquisition and generation of a suite of 29 mineral abundance and mineral composition maps derived from airborne HyMap hyperspectral imagery (204 flight-lines) covering four geological provinces (Mount Isa, Georgetown, Charters Towers and Hodgkinson) across geological/structural/mineralised corridors (each about 12 km wide and 50 km long and covering 16,000 km2) in north Queensland.

Reference: Cudahy, T.J., Jones, M., Thomas, M., Laukamp, C., Caccetta, M., Hewson, R.D., Rodger, A.R. and Verrall, M. 2008. Next Generation Mineral Mapping: Queensland Airborne HyMap™ and Satellite ASTER Surveys 2006–2008; CSIRO Exploration and Mining Open File Report P2007/364; Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO): Canberra, Australia.