The French and German space agencies launched a project on Tuesday to put quantum sensors into orbit to better measure fluctuations in Earth's gravity, particularly linked to earthquakes and rising sea levels.
This new technology uses the properties of quantum physics, which governs the world at an infinitesimal scale, to measure with extreme precision various acceleration phenomena, such as the movements of the masses that make up the Earth.
The CARIOQA mission, launched by the French space agency CNES and the German space agency DLR with funding from the European Commission, aims to fly a quantum sensor on board a satellite by 2030, a world first, according to Christine Fallet, project manager at the French National Center for Space Studies (CNES).
These hypersensitive instruments are just beginning to be used on the ground, particularly in mining research, but without providing a global view of the Earth.
Hence the interest in moving away from it to be able to observe and map the entire gravity field, explains Félix Perosanz, scientist in charge of applications for the CARIOQA project at the CNES, to AFP.
The prospects for its use in geosciences are eagerly awaited, this expert emphasizes, for example to detect precursor signals of earthquakes by detecting the movement of tectonic plates at depth – a movement that we currently only measure on the surface and retrospectively can.
“We will be able to monitor seismic risk zones continuously and globally,” explains Félix Perosanz.
The same goes for volcanoes, detecting movements that herald an eruption.
Other applications: monitoring the movement of water masses during melting ice, heavy rains, floods, and more detailed observation of sea level rise associated with increasing water mass and expansion due to global warming.
These future gravity measurements will complement all space missions to observe climate change.
In an initial demonstration phase, the quantum sensor developed by Airbus Defense and Space will be placed in orbit, between 500 and 600 kilometers from Earth. It works with cold atoms that are manipulated using lasers.
Weightlessness will allow a longer measurement time than on Earth (up to five seconds compared to a tenth of a second), which will significantly increase the sensitivity of the sensor, says Thomas Lévèque, head of the instruments.