High productivity multi-sensor seabed Mapping Sonar for Marine Mineral Resources Exploration

Marine Mineral Resources Exploration is an emerging activity requiring suitable equipment that will deliver on a timely manner both geo-referenced seabed maps and sub-bottom profiles. The race for deep sea mining has globally started while costs involved have to be minimized at all stages from exploration to exploitation. Building on its 20-year long experience in designing and manufacturing active transducers and passive sensors, the Sonar Systems Division of iXBlue is also at the cutting edge of the synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) development while mastering the long range underwater acoustic communication transducer technology (used for instance by JAMSTEC) and the Wide-Band, Flat Spectrum Sub-Bottom Profiler Transducers. The SAMS is a modular Synthetic Aperture Mapping Sonar product-line delivering real-time geo-referenced maps at a high productivity rate (>133km/day). Several solutions with diverse resolutions and ranges are available while host platforms are multiple (Towed Fish, AUV). The SAMS-DT6000 in particular will be presented as it has been especially designed for Marine Mineral Resource Exploration as deep as -6000m. This paper describes more specifically the time synchronization and references to manage accurate data positioning.