TUM Drone Laser System Maps Volcano Gas Before Eruptions

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich have flown a drone and laser system that maps the gas cloud over an active volcano with roughly 5 percent measurement error, and they ran the first fully autonomous deployment on Vulcano, an Aeolian island off the coast of Sicily. The target is the chemical signal that precedes an eruption, measured without sending a single volcanologist up the crater rim.

The setup splits the work between the ground and the air, funded under the German Research Foundation project Measurement Technology on Flying Platforms. A laser mounted on a ground cart automatically tracks a drone carrying a reflector, and the beam weakens as it crosses the volcanic gas between them. That fading signal is the measurement: the more gas in the path, the more the laser gets absorbed.