As a leading Remote Sensing consultant with 25 years of experience in Mining, Mineral exploration and environmental monitoring GEOSENSE offers a wide range of Remote Sensing services for Exploration, Mining and environmental impact mapping.
These services include providing airborne Remote Sensing services using Unmanned Aircraft (UAS)
The developments in the fields of UAS technology and Sensor technology have made so much progress that it is now possible to operate expensive and complex sensors on reliable UAS’s in a safe manner.
Unmanned aircraft can be equipped with a variety of sensors. This provides a very powerful, cost-saving and flexible tool for geological mapping, geophysical surveying, mineral exploration, mine management and environmental monitoring. Unmanned aircraft can not only replace costly traditional manned airborne surveys in a number of scenarios, but also are very useful to support fieldwork in areas that are dangerous or otherwise hard to access. The ability to fly close to the surface also allows us to collect information with much higher detail and precision than possible with manned aircraft. Easy mobilization makes this technology particularly economic for smaller areas.
With its high accuracy and easy mobilization, this technology is obviously a game changer for open pit and stockpile monitoring.
The SMARTPLANES unmanned aircraft is a small and robust fixed-wing UAV designed for airphoto surveys in rugged conditions. It is equipped with a photo camera, suitable for the creation of airphoto mosaics with a spatial resolution better than 4 cm. Because of the high degree of stereo-overlap between adjacent photo’s, it can be used to generate Digital Elevation Models with a vertical accuracy better than 5 cm.
The entire plane is transported in a small suitcase, and it takes about ten minutes to prepare the system for a survey flight. Once the survey is programmed in the ground station and uploaded into the autopilot, the plane will conduct the survey fully automatically, and return to base when the survey is completed.
Even though the underlying technology is highly complex, the operation of the plane is simple. It requires two-three days for a person with no earlier experience in unmanned flying.
3D- model of Rosia Montana Tailings dam, generated with Smartplanes Imagery
For more information see our websites: www.geosense.nl or www.ursus-airborne.com