Upscaling ground-based backpack gamma-ray spectrometry to spatial resolution of UAV-based gamma-ray spectrometry for system validation.

Advances in the development of gamma-ray spectrometers have resulted in devices that are ideal for use in conjunction with the increasingly reliable systems of autonomously flying uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) that have recently become available on the market. Airborne gamma-ray spectrometry (GRS) measurements have many different applications. Here, the technique is applied to a former uranium mining and processing site, which is characterized by relatively low specific activities and, hence, low count rates, requiring relatively large detectors and correspondingly big size UAVs.