Abstract
Measuring gravity from an aircraft or a ship is essential in geodesy, geophysics, mineral and hydrocarbon exploration, and navigation. Today, only relative sensors are available for onboard gravimetry. This is a major drawback because of the calibration and drift estimation procedures which lead to important operational constraints. Atom interferometry is a promising technology to obtain onboard absolute gravimeter. But, despite high performances obtained in static condition, no precise measurements were reported in dynamic. Here, we present absolute gravity measurements from a ship with a sensor based on atom interferometry. Despite rough sea conditions, we obtained precision below 10−5 m s−2. The atom gravimeter was also compared with a commercial spring gravimeter and showed better performances. This demonstration opens the way to the next generation of inertial sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope) based on atom interferometry which should provide high-precision absolute measurements from a moving platform.
Highlights
Measuring gravity from an aircraft or a ship is essential in geodesy, geophysics, mineral and hydrocarbon exploration, and navigation
Higher spatial resolutions can only be obtained with airborne or ship-borne measurements. These surveys were carried out with relative sensors which only measure the variation of gravity and which suffer from drift
The use of an absolute gravimeter would be of great interest but until now these instruments can only work in static conditions
Summary
Measuring gravity from an aircraft or a ship is essential in geodesy, geophysics, mineral and hydrocarbon exploration, and navigation. The atom gravimeter was compared with a commercial spring gravimeter and showed better performances This demonstration opens the way to the generation of inertial sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope) based on atom interferometry which should provide highprecision absolute measurements from a moving platform. We report a cold atom sensor performing absolute gravity measurements on a ship with a precision better than a usual calibrated spring gravimeter. This has been possible, thanks to several innovations such as the integration of a miniature atom sensor to a gyro-stabilized platform and the extension of the measurement range of the atom accelerometer by three orders of magnitude by combining it with a forced balanced accelerometer. The gravimeter (see Fig. 1) is composed of an atom sensor which provides an absolute measurement of the acceleration, a gyro-stabilized platform which maintains the accelerometer aligned with the gravity acceleration despite angular movements of the ship, and systems which provide the lasers and microwaves needed for the atom sensor and perform data acquisition and processing
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