Callio Lab – a GoldenEye field trial site at the Pyhäsalmi mine in Finland

Callio Lab is a multidisciplinary research centre operating at the Pyhäsalmi mine in Finland and it is coordinated by the Kerttu Saalasti Institute of the University of Oulu.  The Callio Lab team is responsible for hosting, facilitating, and supporting field trials conducted at the Pyhäsalmi site during the EU funded H2020 project GoldenEye. They are also involved in evaluating the piloted techniques, which includes providing ground truths and other comparative data that can be used for validation. The field trials include pilots such as monitoring the stability of tailing ponds and the deployment of an underground simulated GNSS system. 

The Pyhäsalmi mine is a prime location for testing remote sensing and positioning technologies in a real-world mining setting, as the environment encompasses many key elements that can be found in mines around the world: active and closed open pits of various steepness, ore and waste rock piles, tailing ponds in various states of use, and a multifaceted landscape. Callio Lab and its predecessor CUPP (the Centre for Underground Physics in Pyhäsalmi) have a long-standing history of cooperation with the mining company, which affords easy access to the area and the possibility of using historical datasets spanning decades. We will be presenting how the Callio Lab environment at the Pyhäsalmi mine can serve as a field trial site in projects such as GoldenEye.  

This work has been supported by the project Earth observation and Earth GNSS data acquisition and processing platform for safe, sustainable and cost-efficient mining operations (Goldeneye) ID: 869398, Horizon 2020.