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very good coordination would be required in the
helicopter so that all the required photography at each site
could be obtained within the ten minute restriction. It was
decided to photograph the smaller of the two sites, the east
portal, in the morning slot to enable experience to be
gained before the larger site at the west portal was
photographed in the lunchtime slot.
The first sortie was flown in July 1991. A crew of three,
in addition to the helicopter pilot, was employed. The
navigator sat in the left front seat beside the pilot and
provided guidance instructions to the pilot. This
crewmember also operated the Linhof. The camera
operator sat in the left rear seat with the third crew member
on his right to assist with and organise the changing of the
plates. An immediate problem not encountered during
pre-flight testing was that the T-Max plates were slightly
undersize for the UMK plate holders. This, added to their
thinness of only 1 mm, made them vulnerable to vibration
and movement within the plateholders. As a result a
number of these plates cracked as the dark slides were
being replaced in the plate holders. With the ten minute
slot constraint per site it was not possible to take these
exposures again.
It had also been decided to take whatever photography was
possible of the site from the ground using the Zeiss Jena
10/1318 camera with 100 mm lens. This was as an
insurance against some of the aerial photography not
being useable because of blurred targets, etc. For this
ground photography Agfa Avipan 100 ISO 130 mm by
180 mm (5.1 inch by 7.1 inch) glass plates would be used.
After the first sortie it was decided not to use the Linhof
on future sorties. Although much simpler to use than the
UMK with glass plates the Linhof's smaller focal length
and resulting smaller image scale resulted in some targets
not being resolved on all of the images at the maximum
taking distance chosen for the UMK. Asthe UMK system
had proved workable and had yielded good results it was
decided that further hiring of the Linhof was an
unnecessary expense.
A number of modifications were carried out after the first
sortie. Firstly the stomach plate for the UMK mount was
greatly enlarged and curved to spread the pressure on the
operator's abdomen. Additional handles were attached to
the sides of the plastic mount to make pointing easier.
Switches for firing the fiducials and shutter were attached
to these handles. An improved sighting system was also
built (Figure 3). The most significant change however
was in the choice of emulsion for the UMK plates. Firstly
it was decided not to use Kodak T-Max 100 plates again
as the breakage rate in the first sortie was unacceptable.
Additionally a faster emulsion was desirable as the second
and third sorties were to take place during the winter and
there was a strong possibility that lighting conditions
would not be as good as during the first sortie. It was
decided to use Kodak T-Max 400 which could be pushed
to a rating of 1600 ISO during processing. However it was
not possible to obtain this emulsion on plates so a decision
was taken, somewhat reluctantly, to use film glued onto
plates. 10 inch by 8 inch (254 mm by 203 mm) sheets of
T-Max 400 were purchased, cut to size and mounted on
old Avipan plates using Scotch Spray Mount.
It was realised that the resulting film unflatness would
result in a lower precision for the second and subsequent
Sorties. Previous tests with the 100mm UMK using cut
film on plates had indicated that errors in image
Figure 3 UMK in redesigned and improved mount
coordinates of up to 60 microns could be expected.
However with the longer focal length, 300 mm, and
resultant narrow lens angle these errors would be reduced
to the 20 micron region and, with sufficient photographs
in the bundle, would not result in unacceptably large errors
in the coordinates of the targets. This loss of precision was
deemed acceptable if the faster film rating would
guarantee the acquisition of measurable images.
The second sortie was flown in October 1991 and a third
sortie, much delayed by weather, was flown in April 1992.
4. MEASUREMENT AND ANALYSIS
All photographs were measured on an Intergraph
Intermap Analytic (IMA) analytical stereoplotter
operating in monocomparator mode. Each fiducial and
target point was measured three times and the
observations meaned. The resultant mean standard
deviations for the plate measurements were of the order
of +/- 3 microns. These observations were transferred to
a Sun Sparcstation where they were run through City
University's General Adjustment Program (GAP). This
is a program written in C for adjusting any combination
of geodetic and photogrammetric observations. In this
case there were only photogrammetric observations. A
feature of GAP is that any combination of datum
constraints can be used (ie points can be fixed, weighted
or free). GAP will recognise any datum deficiency and
automatically border the matrix of normal equations
accordingly. In this instance no target points were held
fixed and "inner constraints" were used where the starting
values of the coordinates of the target points were used to
define the datum. The camera positions were not used in
the definition of the datum as these would vary from sortie
to sortie.
Table 1 lists the results from GAP for various
combinations of data for epoch 2. These are: using just
the aerial photography; using just the ground
photography; and using both sets together. It can be seen
that there is a great increase in precision when both the
aerial and the ground photography are used. It was
noticed that when using the a priori standard deviations
for the plate observations for epoch 2 that the variance
factor after running GAP with the aerial photography only