EO-1 Hyperion sensor is the first spaceborne hyperspectral instrument to acquire both VNIR and SWIR spectra. A Hyperion image which covers the middle part of the southeastern Chocolate Mountains district and the Rainbow mine area was used to evaluate the utility of Hyperion imagery in identifying gold-related rock units in this area. A group of pre-Tertiary gneiss appears to be the favorable host of gold deposits in the district. Satellite mapping of gold-associated lithologic units is helpful for the search for gold and understanding the regional geology. Pre-processing aspects of Hyperion data before it can be used for information extraction were first addressed in the study. The data dimension was reduced for data redundancy removal and feature extraction. A supervised classifier was finally used to extract the lithologic units that are significant for gold exploration in the study area. The result shows that MLC classifier is efficient for the extraction of lithologic units from the Hyperion data in the study area

and the resultant rock units have excellent correlation with those on the geologic reference map. The MLC classifier creates a "hard" classification with an overall accuracy of 86% and a Kappa coefficient 0.81. This case study indicates that Hyperion data can achieve accurate mapping of gold-associated rock units in the southeastern Chocolate Mountains.