New concepts for airborne gravity measurement

A fundamental survey of vehicle mounted gravimeters shows the superposition from the gravity and the kinematical acceleration due to item modification. The particular problems of airborne gravimetry lie in the presence of relatively strong disturbances due to air turbulence. The vehicle acceleration caused in this manner is from high dynamics and up to a factor of 10⁶ greater than the anomaly signal (local changes of acceleration due to the earth's gravitation). Thus, the technically scientific problem of utilizing gravimeters in airplanes lies in a suitable compensation for the vehicle's acceleration. The measurement methods applied reduce the high frequency disturbance signal with the aid of a low-pass filter. These methods are restricted only for the localization of very large anomalies. The required resolution for an air gravimeter cannot be reached only through a direct low-pass or band-pass filtering, since the frequency ranges of the disturbance and the anomaly overlap. A clear improvement of the resolution requires completely new concepts. For separating gravity and kinematical acceleration, there must be further sensors that are not influenced by gravity, e.g. altimeter and the Global Positioning System (GPS). An overall system, into which the individual sensors are integrated and associated via suitable complementary filtering with each other, allows it to register gravity with a higher resolution than is presently possible.