Fleet Space + HiSeis: The Next-Generation of Active Seismic Solutions

By Flavia Tata Nardini, CEO & Co-Founder, Fleet Space Technologies

At Fleet Space, our mission is to build the next-generation of exploration technologies to drive faster, smarter, and cleaner mineral discoveries in the 21st century. As global demand for the minerals needed for the energy transition continue to skyrocket, global mining companies urgently need high-quality geophysical data insights faster to drive more agile operations and future-proof their exploration strategies in the AI era.

Historically, the core geophysical toolkit used in modern mineral exploration produces fragmented, unstandardised datasets that are difficult to integrate and process into actionable insights. Fleet Space’s focus on connecting tools like passive seismic, MT, gravity, and drilling to satellites is the path to fundamentally change the rate and quality of data used in mineral exploration. As autonomous vehicles, vaccine development, or reusable rockets demonstrate, real-time data inputs and machine learning drive breakthroughs that greatly extend the reach of humanity’s abilities.

This led us to build Fleet Space’s vertically integrated exploration platform, ExoSphere, to enable the real-time acquisition and processing of terabytes of 3D exploration data from anywhere on Earth. In the process, we built the world’s first satellite-enabled geophones to deliver real-time 3D subsurface imaging up to 7km in depth with Ambient Noise Tomography (ANT). Since then, we have added gravity, MT, and HVSR to our ExoSphere multiphysics portfolio. Today, the ExoSphere platform is being deployed across the world’s premiere mining projects with majors like Rio Tinto, Barrick, Gold Fields, and Maaden, among many others.

Real-Time & Scalable: Building the Future of Seismic Exploration Tech

Now we are turning our sights on building the next-generation of active seismic solutions. Active seismic delivers exceptionally high-resolution subsurface images by sending controlled energy pulses into the ground and measuring how they reflect off geological features. It’s a powerful tool, but traditionally, it’s slow, logistically challenging, and produces highly complex datasets, limiting its ability to scale.

That’s why we acquired HiSeis, the global leader in hard-rock active seismic imaging, to integrate the power of real-time telemetry, remote data quality control, and AI to a category of solutions that, until now, was largely constrained by highly manual workflows. By connecting HiSeis’ active seismic solutions to the ExoSphere platform, not only have we created the most comprehensive seismic exploration offering on the planet, but also made active seismic more scalable and richer in data volume and quality. 

AngloGold Ashanti 3D Seismic Case Study: Imaging key lithology associated with gold mineralization

While this is an important step for the future of exploration technologies, unlocking the potential of active seismic depends on rethinking the hardware design from first principles. At Fleet Space, we are developing satellite-enabled, miniaturised, and portable active seismic hardware designed specifically to make the technique scalable for modern mineral exploration. By shrinking the hardware and connecting it to Fleet Space’s satellite network, we can create light-weight, field-deployable systems that transmit active seismic data in real-time, enabling faster decision making and significant reduction in the operational footprint of seismic campaigns. The result is a more agile, cost-effective, and scalable approach to subsurface imaging - unlocking new possibilities for high-resolution exploration in remote or previously inaccessible areas.

Next-Level Seismic: Passive & Active Integration 

Even more transformative is how real-time active seismic will work in tandem with Fleet Space’s real-time passive seismic solutions. While passive seismic excels in detecting subsurface structures using ambient seismic noise - ideal for mapping structural controls across scales from district to target - active seismic enables targeted high-resolution imaging. Together, they create a powerful feedback loop: passive seismic identifies structures and opportunity zones over large areas, while active seismic hones in with precision detail at the target scale. 

In addition to enhancing the accuracy and speed of drill targeting decisions, this approach will also significantly reduce the environmental impact of active seismic deployments by shortening field time for exploration teams, decreasing the equipment footprint, minimising re-surveys, and avoiding repeat impact with local terrain and habitats. In short: we’re fusing active and passive into a rapidly deployable, real-time, and unified seismic exploration toolkit to make the precision and scale they provide more broadly available to the global mining industry.

Agile Exploration: High-Quality Data + Continuous AI Learning Loops

In the AI era, high-quality, AI-ready data, collected at scale will be an indispensable asset to discover new mineral deposits and build resilient supply chains for the century ahead. AI is only as good as the data it’s fed, and only as valuable as its ability to simplify and accelerate exploration workflows. The future belongs to those who can gather, process, and act on data faster and more effectively than ever before. Today, the vast data lakes used by mining companies are often unstandardised and fragmented, making them largely incompatible with modern AI systems as a result.

With ExoSphere and its real-time seismic solutions, customers can acquire vast amounts of exploration data rapidly in the exact areas and data types needed to unlock the predictive potential of AI. And by integrating Fleet Space’s proprietary multimodal AI models at the top of the ExoSphere stack, customers around the world are leveraging frontier AI models trained on their real-time survey data, optimising their drill targeting while in the field. Now, exploration teams can iterate, adapt, and act on intelligence faster - not just raw data.

From Static to Dynamic: Unlocking the Potential of Exploration Data at Scale

By rapidly integrating vast 3D and 2D datasets of seismic, electromagnetics, gravity, geochemistry, and drilling within the ExoSphere platform, remote field teams are shifting their strategies from using data to validate pre-existing hypotheses, to using data to drive and iterate on them. We are moving from an industry based on extraction to one built on real-time data intelligence.

That shift will fundamentally change how we explore, how we assess risk, and how we build the supply chains for Earth’s clean energy future. In this new paradigm, the companies that can gather, process, and convert data into insights faster than ever before will lead the next chapter of mineral discovery. And building the next-generation of active seismic solutions to further collapse the timeline between data collection and decision-making is a vital link in the chain connecting the global mining sector to its future. 

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To learn more about Fleet Space's active seismic solutions, reach out to our team here.