Abstract
Detection of the Earth’s magnetic field anomalies is the basis of many types of studies in the field of earth sciences and archaeology. These surveys require different ways to carry out the measures but they have in common that they can be very tiring or expensive. There are now several lightweight commercially available magnetic sensors that allow light-UAVs to be equipped to perform airborne measurements for a wide range of scenarios. In this work, the realization and functioning of an airborne magnetometer prototype were presented and discussed. Tests and measures for the validation of the experimental setup for some applications were reported. The flight sessions, appropriately programmed for different types of measurements, made it possible to evaluate the performance of this detection methodology, highlighting the advantages and drawbacks or limitations and future developments. From the results obtained it was possible to verify that the measurement system is capable of carrying out local and potentially archaeological magnetometric measurements with the necessary precautions.
Highlights
Magnetometry is the branch of geophysics which deals with the Earth’s magnetic field and its spatio-temporal variations
The device consists of a magnetic sensor and a controlling unit which has been appropriately designed to be integrated into unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) platforms (Figure 1)
The choice to suspend the magnetic sensor below the UAV by means of a wire gave rise expected to find anomalies caused by other archaeological complexes of the same periods to harmonic oscillations of the sensor
Summary
Magnetometry is the branch of geophysics which deals with the Earth’s magnetic field and its spatio-temporal variations. The variations in the Earth’s magnetic field may occur at different scales (i.e., global, regional, and local) and may be ascribable to different sources, either natural or anthropogenic [1]. Each application requires a proper type of magnetic sensor(s) and a targeted surveying method that mainly depend on the scale of the anomalies to investigate and on the desired resolution. Satellite measurements are used for global magnetic models with 1–5-km resolution [9]. Airborne or shipborne surveys investigate the regional anomalies with resolution in the order of hundreds to thousands of meters [10]. Ground-based magnetic measurements investigate the shallower ground reaching sub-metric resolution
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