Inflection Resources (CSE: AUCU) and Fleet Space announced on Wednesday a collaboration to pioneer the use of space technology and AI to accelerate the discovery of large-scale copper-gold deposits in Australia’s Macquarie Arc.
The initiative leverages the real-time ambient noise tomography (ANT) survey capabilities of Fleet Space’s mineral exploration technology on a largescale geophysical survey in New South Wales, conducted under an exploration agreement with AngloGold Ashanti and in partnership with Fleet Space in what the company said is the world’s largest ANT copper survey.
Fleet Space, developer and operator of microsatellites that enabled their end-to-end mineral exploration solution, ExoSphere, was last year named Australia’s fastest-growing company by the Financial Review.
Inflection and Fleet Space have initiated an 1,800 km² ANT survey using the ExoSphere solution across Inflection’s portfolio of projects in New South Wales, all of which are included as part of the exploration agreement with AngloGold.
Inflection said it has identified several new priority targets under a thick sequence of sedimentary cover masking the underlying, older prospective geology at their Duck Creek project in New South Wales.
The aim of the survey, Inflection said, is to collect large-scale, 3D subsurface data to identify potential cross-arc structures which are known to vector fluid flow and often influence the emplacement of large-scale intrusive bodies and mineral systems.
The outputs of the survey will be incorporated into Inflection’s evolving interpretation of the Macquarie Arc under a blanket of post-mineral cover with the goal of prioritizing the existing drill targets and identifying new ones.
“The end-to-end capabilities of ExoSphere and the 3D subsurface insights it unlocked at our Duck Creek project have helped Inflection rapidly identify several new high-priority drill targets and demonstrated that the ExoSphere system can accelerate the data-driven exploration of our projects,” Inflection CEO Alistair Waddell said in a news release.
Waddell also said ExoSphere will be deployed on a large scale across Inflection’s projects in the Macquarie Arc and will leverage Fleet Space’s AI-powered prospectivity insights to aid exploration across the porphyry copper-gold province.
“Without a major acceleration in copper discoveries, humanity’s transition to renewable energy and building the infrastructure necessary for the global AI industry are unachievable,” Fleet Space CEO Flavia Tata Nardini said.
“We are proud to conduct the world’s largest mineral exploration survey with ambient noise tomography in support of Inflections’ data-driven exploration of the Macquarie Arc.”
