In December 2025, Aster Funds director John Ryder, Hons BSc, P.Geo, spoke at the 36th Geological Remote Sensing Group (GRSG) Annual Conference, held at Burlington House, home of the Geological Society of London.
His talk, Predicting the Winu Copper Project, Western Australia, Utilizing Remote Sensing, was part of the Mineral Mapping & Exploration session on the final day of the conference.
## Why Winu?
Winu, in the Paterson Province of Western Australia, is a major intrusion-related copper–gold–silver system discovered by Rio Tinto. It lies beneath more than 50 m of sand and Permian cover. Most people assume satellites can't see a deposit like that.
We wanted to test that assumption using only public information.
## What we did
- Calibrated on public drilling. We used the 42 drill holes in Rio Tinto's first release, from August 2019.
- Mapped the whole region. We unmixed ASTER thermal (LWIR) imagery into 16 mineral maps across a 58-scene mosaic covering about 11,600 km².
- Trained a predictive model on the Winu mineral signature, then ran it across the entire area.
The maps were completed in March and April 2020.
## What we found
- The prediction matched the drilled mineralized footprint with more than 80% accuracy. It outlined the copper–gold orebodies with over 60% accuracy, before resource drilling was completed in 2021.
- A second hotspot to the east lined up with the Ngapakarra copper–gold deposit, which wasn't announced publicly until July 2020, months after our maps were made.
## Why it matters for explorers
Covered and concealed deposits are where many of the next major discoveries will come from. They're also the most expensive to explore blind.
The Winu test shows that, calibrated on a handful of drill holes, satellite mineral mapping can rank ground across an entire district before more drilling money is committed.
Presenting the work to the GRSG, the UK's specialist forum for geological remote sensing, put the method in front of the people best placed to test it.
## Read more
- [Read the full Winu case study](/case-studies/winu-copper)
- [See all our case studies](/case-studies)
- [GRSG 2025 conference programme](https://www.grsg.org.uk/36th-grsg-annual-conference-agm-2025)
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Exploring under cover? We can calibrate on your drill holes and map targets across your whole tenement. [Request a survey](/request-a-survey) or call +1 905 392 9003.