Look at the ASTER Mission statement at http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/mission.asp. It doesn't have as good of an interface as MODIS but it is not the worst I have ever seen. It collects 14 different bands of high spatial resolution data and goes from the visible to the thermal infrared wavelengths and can create DEMs. It give some suggestions for things you can do with the data, on their "science page". A few of the things they list, such as the "vegetation and ecosystem dynamics", "hazard monitoring", and "Land surface and land coverage change" are things that I am interested in. I just hope that they are not things that I would have to do myself.
Instruments
Under the instrument page (http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/instrument.asp) they have some pretty cool semi-interactive drawings of the satellite but they are not of use to me. However, the exploration and explanation of the three subsystems are useful.
VNIR (visible and near infrared) has a resolution of 15m (better than MODIS!) and is probably the subsystem they use for making their DEMS. They use a combination of different filters to allow different bands to inspect the same ground with the a data rate of 62Mbps (don't know what that means exactly).
Shortwave Infrared (SWIR) which I think what was mentioned for use as a veg index but I don't remember. The SWIR has a 30m resolution but because of the combination of filters/detectors there is a parallax error of .5 pixels per 900m and it operates in 6 spectral bands in the near-IR region.
Thermal Infrared (TIR)of course looks at thermal infrared in 5 bands with a resolution of 90m. I am unsure exactly how we could use this and especially because this has the lowest resolution but it is still better than MODIS.
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