TY  - CPAPER
A1  - Stele, Andreas
A1  - Linck, Roland
A1  - Schikorra, Markus
T1  - Large-scale UAV magnetometryon a former World War II airfield at Ganacker(Lower Bavaria, Germany)
Y1  - 2022
N2  - In the last few years, several Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based magnetometer systems have been tested for archaeological prospection. Due to their higher sensitivity, scalar magnetometers have been preferred as test sensors. However, total field magnetometer are vulnerable to disturbances, especially those generated by the UAV itself. Therefore, most UAV scalar magnetometer systems use the method of increasing the distance between magnetic sensors and the UAV to reduce interference. But freely suspended sensors tend to swing on ropes under the UAV and can produce data that are strongly influenced by heading errors. For our test, we therefore chose the UAV-fixed, compact setup of the SENSYS MagDrone R4, which is equipped with five three-axis FGM3D/75 fluxgate sensors at 50 cm spacing and is covering a swath width of 2.5 m. The 200Hz sampling rate of the R4 allows easy filtering of interference generated by the UAV and external disturbances like power lines or infrastructure. Magnetograms with a spatial resolution of up to 0.20 m per pixel were produced from the data. At Ganacker, we chose the former infrastructure core of the World War II German Air Force airfield as a test site. A wide range of archaeological structures and features with high magnetic contrast were expected on this area. The test site is currently an open agricultural area with a quite flat terrain. Hence, the R4 could be operated at a fixed flight height of just one metre above the surface of the terrain that is controlled actively by a radar sensor. An area of around 110 hectares were prospected within only four days. The MagDrone R4 system thus offers an outstanding survey area progress that cannot even reached by common vehicle-moved multi-sensor arrays. Here, we present the first results of this test survey by comparing the magnetograms, historical and current geodata. Most of the expected archaeological features and several unknown ones were detected by the R4 system. Our results show that the R4 system is well suited for mapping large archaeological structures with high magnetisations. In the future, we want to compare the R4 data with data from a ground-based fluxgate magnetometer. We also want to test whether the system is suitable for detecting archaeological features that have lower magnetic susceptibility and remanence contrasts with the surrounding soil.
UR  - http://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?gldocs-11858/9674
ER  -