Performance of Two Different Flight Configurations for Drone-Borne Magnetic Data

The compensation of magnetic and electromagnetic interference generated by drones is one of the main problems related to drone-borne magnetometry. The simplest solution is to suspend the magnetometer at a certain distance from the drone. However, this choice may compromise the flight stability or introduce periodic data variations generated by the oscillations of the magnetometer. We studied this problem by conducting two drone-borne magnetic surveys using a prototype system based on a cesium-vapor magnetometer with a 1000 Hz sampling frequency. First, the magnetometer was fixed to the drone landing-sled (at 0.5 m from the rotors), and then it was suspended 3 m below the drone. These two configurations illustrate endmembers of the possible solutions, favoring the stability of the system during flight or the minimization of the mobile platform noise. Drone-generated noise was filtered according to a CWT analysis, and both the spectral characteristics and the modelled source parameters resulted analogously to that of a ground magnetic dataset in the same area, which were here taken as a control dataset. This study demonstrates that careful processing can return high quality drone-borne data using both flight configurations. The optimal flight solution can be chosen depending on the survey target and flight conditions.