Advancing airborne gravimetry with quantum technology (AeroQGrav)

Gravimetry is becoming increasingly important in various fields of geodesy and the geosciences. For example, it can be used to quantify climate change by measuring changes in mass distribution and can assist in the search for raw material deposits.

Airborne gravimetry can be used to close the gap between small scaled ground gravimetry and satellite gravimetry which allows for global measurements. Until now, relative gravimeters are used in flight gravimetry, which have various disadvantages, like a high drift and limited resolution. These and additional problems can be mostly reduced or eliminated with quantum gravimeters, which leads to numerous applications. So far, absolute gravimeters are mostly used in static environments, but have been tried on slowly and uniformly moving platforms (shipborne gravimetry).

Unfortunately, the high velocity and its changes, as well as small rapid changes in the motion of an aircraft superimpose the sought-after gravitational acceleration. Therefore, to extract the gravitational acceleration from the measurements, the aircraft motion needs to be reconstructed as accurate as possible, which is to be realized through multiple sensor data fusion.

The project AeroQGrav aims to develop and operate an absolute quantum optical sensor on a moving platform. To this end, we are currently simulating the expected measurements. We hope to incorporate first in-flight measurements concerning the movement and velocity of the plane to make the simulation-results more realistic with respect to the environment of the aircraft.