Surveying Earth's Gravity with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

To assist with the National Geodetic Survey’s federal mandate to provide accurate positioning—including heights—to all federal non-military mapping activities in the USA, Aurora Flight Sciences proposes to integrate a gravimetry payload on a unmanned aerial system (UAS). Potential options include using either an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or an optionally piloted aircraft (OPA). An OPA is an unmanned aerial system (UAS) that is integrated into an aircraft combining the best of manned and unmanned surveillance aircraft capabilities and can be flown traditionally manned, completely unmanned as a UAS, and in a hybrid mode-pilot on-board, but the aircraft is controlled as a UAS by a ground station. Flying a gravimeter on a OPA opens tremendous flexibility of operations for the user-flexibility that ultimately results in cost and time savings. One system satisfies both the manned and unmanned needs, so the user does not have to support two different aerial systems to perform the survey mission. And as current legislation limits UAV flights to specifically designated airspace, an OPA gives the NGS freedom to operate outside of currently available airspace, expanding the reach of the survey.