Skip to content

Capabilities

Mag ISR

Magnetic intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance — detecting what other sensors cannot see.

  • Defense
A magnetometer traverse across a survey line, with the magnetic contours closing into a bullseye over a buried anomaly.
A small uncrewed aircraft flying low over open ground under flat overcast light, terrain filling most of the frame.
Generated image, not a photograph of Mesa Quantum. How a magnetic survey is flown: low, slow and in straight lines over the ground being read.
What a magnetic survey actually produces. The contours are the field over an area; the lattice over them is where it is being sampled, and it advances one grid spacing at a time as the sensor works along the survey line. The anomaly stays where it is; the array moves.

What it is

Everything made of metal, and everything carrying current, bends the magnetic field around it. A sensitive enough magnetometer turns that distortion into a detection — and it does so passively, because the field was already there. Nothing is transmitted, so nothing announces that a survey is taking place.

Sensitivity is only half of it. A magnetometer is useful in the field when it is small enough to carry, stable enough to trust between surveys, and repeatable enough that two units produce the same map of the same ground. Those are manufacturing properties rather than physics properties, and they are the ones we work on.

Example applications

Defense
Detection and characterization of buried, submerged or shielded objects that give away nothing to a camera or a radar, and mapping of areas where an active sensor would be the first thing noticed.

Talk to us about Mag ISR

Tell us what you are trying to find, what the ground or the structure is made of, and how the sensor has to travel.

Get in touch