Marine and Airborne Gravimetry with an Absolute Cold Atom Sensor

Gravity field mapping from moving vehicles as ship or aircraft allows to cover large regional areas with a spatial resolution ranging from typically 1 to 10 km. In this paper, we present an absolute cold atom gravimeter capable of performing high performance measurements in such dynamical environments. The demonstrated stability and repeatability reached typically few 0.1 × 10−5 m.s−2 in a marine campaign [1] and few 1 ×10−5 m.s−2 in an airborne survey [2]. The intrinsic very high stability of this atom sensor allows to relax many operational constraints linked to drifts or calibration processes and to obtain repeatable and harmonized gravity maps on long time scales.