Flight test results from a strapdown airborne gravity system

Abstract.

In June 1995, a flight test was carried out over the Rocky Mountains to assess the accuracy of airborne gravity for geoid determination. The gravity system consisted of a strapdown inertial navigation system (INS), two GPS receivers with zero baseline on the airplane and multiple GPS master stations on the ground, and a data logging system. To the best of our knowledge, this was the first time that a strapdown INS has been used for airborne gravimetry. The test was designed to assess repeatability as well as accuracy of airborne gravimetry in a highly variable gravity field. An east-west profile of 250 km across the Rocky Mountains was chosen and four flights over the same ground track were made. The flying altitude was about 5.5km, i.e., between 2.5 and 5.0km above ground, and the average flying speed was about 430km/h. This corresponds to a spatial resolution (half wavelength of cutoff frequency) of 5.07.0km when using filter lengths between 90 and 120s. This resolution is sufficient for geoid determination, but may not satisfy other applications of airborne gravimetry. The evaluation of the internal and external accuracy is based on repeated flights and comparison with upward continued ground gravity using a detailed terrain model. Gravity results from repeated flight lines show that the standard deviation between flights is about 2mGal for a single profile and a filter length of 120s, and about 3mGal for a filter length of 90s. The standard deviation of the difference between airborne gravity upward continued ground gravity is about 3mGal for both filter lengths. A critical discussion of these results and how they relate to the different transfer functions applied, is given in the paper. Two different mathematical approaches to airborne scalar gravimetry are applied and compared, namely strapdown inertial scalar gravimetry (SISG) and rotation invariant scalar gravimetry (RISG). Results show a significantly better performance of the SISG approach for a strapdown INS of this accuracy class. Because of major differences in the error model of the two approaches, the RISG method can be used as an effective reliability check of the SISG method. A spectral analysis of the residual errors of the flight profiles indicates that a relative geoid accuracy of 23cm over distances of 200km (0.1 ppm) can be achieved by this method. Since these results present a first data analysis, it is expected that further improvements are possible as more refined modelling is applied.