Requirements analysis of airborne gravity gradiometry on moving-based platform

Abstract:

Airborne gravity and gravity gradient measurement are the most effective ways for the earth gravitational field measurement. Gravity gradient is a derivative of gravity acceleration, due to the high order feature of gravity gradient, it is more sensitive to short wave component, and can reflect the details of the source so that the gravity gradient measurement has wide applications in geophysical science, resource exploration, and inertial navigation. Airborne gravity gradient measurement uses the plane or ship as the platform, and it is efficient and high precision. In this paper, We compared the gravity and gravity gradient measurement, and analyzed the advantages of the gravity gradient measurement compared with gravity measurement. The airborne gravity gradient measurement system and the inertial stabilization platform were discussed. By setting a goal sensitivity of the gravity gradient measurement being 1 E/√Hz, the key factors of the stabilized platform, namely the pointing accuracy, pointing stability, and gyroscope random drift, are 0.5°, 0.01°/hr/√Hz, and 0.01°/hr respectively. Compared with the airborne gravity measurement whose goal sensitivity is 1mGal/√Hz, the requirements of moving-based gravity gradient measurement on the inertial stabilization platform is significantly lower and hence easy to realize, and the major reason is the differential measurement mode being used.