Probing the Earth

Lakeside firm patents advanced remote sensing technology

By NANCY KIMBALL

The Daily Inter Lake

A high-tech company in Lakeside is spending $4 million in a new effort to show geologists which rocks to kick as they search for mineral deposits.

Last week, inventor Larry Vance received a patent on the microelectronics and nanotechnology to launch that effort in earnest.

Vance's company, Earth Search Sciences Inc., leapfrogged over a full generation of its own hyperspectral remote sensing technology and received the patent on what is being dubbed the Probe 3 - a hyper-upgrade of its Probe 1 instrument.

"This is tremendous technology," Vance said. "And it doesn't lie to you. It's just like a fingerprint. We still have to kick the rocks to confirm things, but it doesn't fool us much any more."

Hyperspectral remote sensing technology is a highly accurate means of getting a picture of the earth's surface from an airplane.

It's not photography - which mineral exploration companies, forest managers and others use in their pursuits - but rather is a measure of the sun's reflectance off the earth's surface.

Each mineral, actually the indicator rock associated with the mineral at the earth's surface, reflects a certain portion of the light spectrum. By measuring that reflectance in given areas, scientists can get a good idea of where exploratory mining is most likely to pay off.

The Probe 1 had 128 channels, or splits of the light spectrum, to measure reflectance.

The Probe 3 has "at least 356, maybe more," Vance said. "As we design it, we'll split it further if we can."

That means data from a Probe 3 flyover not only can identify myriad rocks, minerals and even weeds that cover the ground, but it can locate each of those items precisely.

"My geologist needs to see which rock I'm talking about. He can drive right to it," Vance said.

"It's the subtle locations of geology that we're talking about, even a single rock that sloughed off the top of a formation - and we can determine which mineral we're looking for."

POTENTIAL COMPETITION spurred Vance to sharpen this most recently patented design.

He began developing the Probe 1 technology nearly three decades ago, when he still lived outside Jackson Hole, Wyo.

That was in the era when LandSat satellites were being launched, providing fairly coarse resolution in the data available. The need for higher resolution led from satellites to a NASA program, which developed the first hyperspectral instrument. Customers paid $164,000 a day - leaving the corporate giants to push smaller companies off the competitive edge.

"But we learned then to build them better, cheaper and faster," Vance said.

In 1983 or 1984 Vance set up Earth Search Science headquarters in Salt Lake City, which was metropolitan enough to provide the support the company needed. He and a team of five Ph.D.-level geologists, "exceptionally good at reviewing imagery and what we had," he said, started flying contracted missions for what grew to be a pretty substantial customer base.

For at least a decade, Vance recalled, there were no high-dollar customers. They all took a "let's see what this will do first" attitude before committing big chunks of their budgets.

"It took years of that before this was accepted in the industry," he said.

The move to Montana came six years ago, "at the insistence of (Senator) Conrad Burns," Vance said. Through Environmental Protection Agency Superfund incentives, they worked out a deal to locate in Anaconda. Within a few years, they moved to Kalispell and now have settled in Lakeside.

Earth Search Sciences was making good headway, but the big players - Boeing, Lockheed, even the U.S. military - saw hyperspectral sensing's potential and started nosing in on the market.

"We had to completely revamp our approach," he said.

About four years ago - with half of what he estimates at only 10 high-level hyperspectral scientists in the world on his team - he set to work on the technology jump to what would become Probe 3.

FROM THE initial NASA-developed instrument that weighed 2,000 pounds, to Vance's first instrument that weighed close to 500 pounds, he now has used microelectronics and nanotechnology to produce a 40-pound instrument that fits in a shoebox.

He can pack it in a suitcase, travel to an overseas client and, because it no longer needs to be mounted in a plane with a hole cut in the belly and covered with glass, lease a Lear jet and fly a logistically uncomplicated mission.

And it's faster, much faster.

"We used to do it at 140 knots, which is close to 200 miles an hour," Vance said, "and now we can do it at 1,000 knots. We can fly higher and faster and get from Point A to Point B quicker."

Vance has the inventor's mind, but not the engineer's acuity in building this kind of technology, so he farmed out different aspects of the design development to a scattered band of engineers. No one engineer has the entire plan, a sort of safety plan for Earth Search Sciences.

He enlisted Intellisense Inc., to help the company "breadboard" the prototype - build the components that go into the small Probe 3 and give it a dry run to be sure it all works. Vance estimates another four years before the final product will be ready.

With research and development figured into the mix, he said the first Probe 3 instrument will cost about $4 million. Angel-fund money is helping with the investment. Future costs will drop after production swings into gear.

It costs about $30,000 a day to use the technology, with the sun's angle limiting a work day to a couple of hours of operation.

Still, "we can collect more data than a geologist on the ground can look at in 10 years in just a few seconds of overflight," he said.

The company's AeroCommander, a twin pressurized turboprop with a Garrett engine, is based with the company pilot in Indiana.

WITH PROBE 3, Earth Search Sciences is launching a new mineral exploration company to partner with the technology.

"We had clients" for which they flew exploration missions, he said, "but we decided to go a different route and make the discoveries ourselves. (We) do the initial exploration, tie them up, do limited geology on it, then go to the seniors."

The seniors are the large mining companies who do most of the world's mineral explorations. But now, at least this one "junior" has the option to choose to go out on his own.

"We will fly for the bigger clients, probably, but only if we can work out a deal to get a piece of what we discover," Vance said.

"In addition, if our country needs us for (Homeland Security and related projects), we will be there for that."

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com