Development of a submersible gravimeter on underwater vehicles
Abstract
Gravity is one of the powerful indices to profile underground structures. Surface ship gravimeters are popular tool for the purpose of collecting gravity values in marine region. They enable you to obtain gravity values from large area easily, while the resolutions are relatively low because of the distance between the sea surface and bottom. Otherwise, ocean bottom gravimeters are able to be observed gravity with high resolution, but they have still covered few limited sites so that they are designed to do observation in quiet only. In some cases, such as hydrothermal deposit survey, the medium performance both in resolution and size of survey area are required. This paper describes a gravimeter we have been developing for satisfying the requirements. Our target is to detect gravity anomalies less than 1 mgal by using an underwater vehicle. This setting is roughly equivalent to find a typical hydrothermal deposit with a dimension of 0.5 km x 0.5 km x 10 m and a density contrast of 1 g/cm3 when we set the sensor at 50 m high from the seafloor. There are some issues such as noise reduction, robustness and downsizing to clear the target. A gravity sensor (Micro-g LaCoste S-174) is mounted on a gimbal control unit with an inertial navigation sensor for the problems. These are stored in a sphere vessel made of titanium alloy (125 kgf in air, 32 kgf in water) and it is available in 3500 m below sea surface. Furthermore, in order to reduce high frequency noise due to mainly the vehicle motion through a low-pass filter, data are able to be stored at sampling rates of approximately 100 Hz. The logging system and control unit for communication to/from ship is stored another canister (22 kgf in air, 10 kgf in water). We made gravity measurement experiments to examine the effectiveness of the gimbal system and filtering application. The gravimeter was set on a machine simulating pitch and roll motions with a period of 16 s and an amplitude of 7.5 degrees, which is greater than expected in actual vehicle motions. We applied two-step low-pass filtering with 1 s and 150 s Gaussian filters to the collected data. The filtering widths correspond to a spatial resolution of 0.1 km order after applied if the vehicle speed be 2 knots. The RMS errors of pitch and roll motions are 0.04 mgal and 0.02 mgal, respectively, after processing of the filtering, tilt and earth tide corrections and removal of linear temporal drift. This is satisfied with our requirement to detect gravity anomalies enough. We are now ready to step into in situ experiments. The first cruise is planning in September 2012 to evaluate this gravimeter and another instrument, gravity gradiometer jointly by using an autonomous underwater vehicle, URASHIMA. In this presentation, we will show you the target of this research, details of the instrument and performance, and the overview and preliminary results of the first cruise.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012AGUFMOS51D1902Y
- Keywords:
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- 0920 EXPLORATION GEOPHYSICS / Gravity methods;
- 1219 GEODESY AND GRAVITY / Gravity anomalies and Earth structure;
- 3010 MARINE GEOLOGY AND GEOPHYSICS / Gravity and isostasy;
- 3080 MARINE GEOLOGY AND GEOPHYSICS / Submergence instruments: ROV;
- AUV;
- submersibles