Aircraft equipped for airborne vector magnetic exploration surveys

1. An aircraft equipped for airborne vector magnetic exploration surveys, comprising:

a gravity gradiometer including an internal navigation system of an aircraft;

three magnetometers orthogonally mounted to measure the components of the earth's vector magnetic field in the aircraft reference frame;

two rotation sensors provided by the internal navigation system, and mounted to measure the angular orientation of the aircraft; and,

a recording system to record the measurements of the magnetometers and rotation sensors; wherein,

correction coefficients computed from calibration survey data and the measured angular orientation is used to remove permanent magnetic effect, inducing magnetic effect and eddy-current magnetic effect of the aircraft from the measured components and to orientate the measured components into the earth's reference frame, so to derive true vector magnetic data from airborne surveys, that is vector aero-magnetic (VAM) data.

2. An aircraft according to claim 1 , where the three magnetometers are flux-gate magnetometers, each measuring the component of the earth's vector magnetic field along its axis, so that the triad is able to measure all three orthogonal components.

3. An aircraft according to claim 1 , where the rotation sensors are gyroscopes which measure heading, bank and elevation.

4. A method of processing data collected during an airborne survey claimed in claim 1 , comprising the following steps:

collecting data describing the orientation or attitude of the aircraft using one or more rotation sensors;

collecting vector magnetic field data using the three magnetometers orthogonally mounted in the aircraft; and

using correction coefficients computed from calibration survey data and the aircraft attitude data provided by the rotation sensors to remove the permanent magnetic effect, induced magnetic effect and eddy-current magnetic effect of the aircraft from the magnetometer data to change the orientation of the magnetometer data; then,

deriving true vector aero-magnetic data.

5. A method according to claim 4 where the processing is done in real time in the aircraft during a survey flight.

6. A method according to claim 4 where the processing is done after the flight has taken place.

7. A method according to claim 4 , where the orientation processing involves the rotation of three components in the aircraft reference frame, that is longitudinal, transversal and vertical, to earth's reference frame, that is north, east and down, and computing and applying heading correction coefficients to the resulting components in the earth's reference frame to account for the direction of the heading of the aircraft.

8. A method according to claim 4 , where the steps first involve ignoring the eddy-current effects of the aircraft and solving for the factors for the permanent magnet and induced magnetic dipole field of the aircraft.

9. A method according to claim 4 , where the permanent magnet and induced magnetic dipole fields are computed and removed from the measured components obtained during the calibration flight.

10. A method according to claim 8 , where the eddy-current effects are then computed from a high-pass filtered version of the corrected data.

11. A method according to claim 8 , where the eddy-current factors are derived line-by-line from the data collected during an airborne survey.

12. A method according to claim 11 , where the data collected during an airborne survey, after corrections of permanent magnet, induced magnetic and eddy-current effects, are further corrected by a process of regression to remove any residual angle effect.

13. A method according to claim 12 , where the further corrected data are then written to the survey database.

14. An aircraft according to claim 1 , wherein the calibration survey data is collected during a calibration flight that is comprised of a plurality of flight lines flown at the same altitude and intersect at the same point.

15. An aircraft according to claim 1 , wherein processing to remove the magnetic effects of the aircraft and to orient the measured components is performed simultaneously.