Santana to test airborne gas detector over Nevada

Explorationists may soon have at their disposal a powerful new method of remotely detecting mineral deposits. The instrumentation is being developed by Skyborne Exploration Canada, which is 51%- held by Alberta-listed Santana Resources.

If successfully tested this summer, the system could become invaluable in the early, airborne reconnaissance phase of mineral exploration.

This new remote sensing method owes its origins to the natural tendency of gas molecules to absorb light. Each gas absorbs light of a particular, known frequency.

Basically the theory is this: A beam of laser light, set at a particular frequency of interest, is transmitted from an airplane. The light beam, which is about 10 inches in diameter when it hits the ground, reflects off the ground and is received again as the airplane flies over a target area.

By measuring how much of the light is absorbed by the intervening gas, scientists can determine with great precision and significant accurancy, the concentrations of a particular gas in that column of air.

Since certain “signature” gases such as mercury, arsenic and antimony are known to be given off by some shallow gold deposits, and methane is given off by massive sulphide deposits the method could prove valuable in detecting unknown deposits.

This indirect method of detecting valuable concentrations of minerals is possible with the advent of excimer-pumped-dye lasers which have a very high repetition rate. Combined with state-of-the-art computer technology for interpreting the large volumes of data collected, these lasers should be able to perform the task presently carried out by ground crews using gas chromatographs.

Phillip Ozdemir, a PhD candidate in Applied Geophysics at Columbia University has devised such an airborne system which will take 200 measurements every second and display anomalous sources on a video display in real time. He is president of Skyborne Exploration Canada of Toronto, which is being financed by Santana Resources, which in turn is 49.3% controlled by Doelcam Inc, a private company controlled by Dennis MacLeod, former president of Pamour Inc.

The hardware necessary for the first test flight, scheduled for this summer, is being assembled at the company’s plant in New Jersey. It will be installed in a Twin Otter which will be test-flown over areas of known gold mineralization in Nevada later this summer.

In lab tests, the system successfully detected mercury gas concentrations as low as 0.5 parts per billion (ppb) at a distance of 500 ft. “Mercury levels in the soil over known gold mineralization in Nevada have been about 10 ppb and are as high as 2 ppm in the air above the soil,” MacLeod says.

“The advantage of this system is that we can measure gas concentrations over the entire length of the laser beam,” MacLeod points out.

“The main reason I decided to finance this project is the technical aspect, which is quite simple to understand.”

Santana has raised $750,000 through a private placement of 1.5 million shares at 50 cents . The company’s shares traded in Alberta this week at about 55 cents .