Glacier mapping often begins where conventional field surveys reach their limits.
There’s a moment in every survey plan when the terrain wins. The slope is too steep, the surface too unstable, the vegetation too thick, or the area is simply too vast for a ground crew to cover in any practical timeframe. For years, that moment marked the edge of what was possible.
SPH Engineering has spent the last decade pushing that edge back. Their latest software release continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible to map in the face of complex terrain and demanding scale.
Mapping Terrain No One on Earth….or Mars, Can Walk
When researchers at the University of Arizona set out to study the internal structure of rock glaciers at Sourdough in Alaska and Galena Creek in Wyoming, they faced a problem that has long defined glaciology fieldwork: the most scientifically significant terrain is often the most physically dangerous to access.
These debris-covered glaciers, with their icy cores hidden beneath thick layers of rock and sediment, are among the best analogs scientists have for similar formations photographed by spacecraft on Mars. Understanding their complex, internal structure on Earth isn’t just a climate question; it’s a proving ground for technology that could one day guide astronauts to accessible water or ice on the Red Planet. “If you want to make decisions about where to drill on Mars, you need to know if the ice you’re trying to find is under one meter of debris or 10,” said Roberto Aguilar, a doctoral researcher at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and lead author of the study. “That’s the kind of information a drone-based system could provide.”
But to get there, the team first had to make it work on Earth in terrain that pushed both the researchers and their equipment to their limits. In Alaska, it meant hauling gear through mosquito swarms. In Wyoming, it meant hiking across boulder fields to reach survey targets higher on the glacier. “It’s not fun walking on those rocks,” Aguilar said. “That’s why it’s better to fly a drone.”
The solution was to take the sensor airborne. By integrating a MALA Geodrone 80 Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) with a DJI Matrice 600 Pro through SPH Engineering’s SkyHub onboard computer, radar altimeter and UgCS flight planning software, the team was able to execute automated low-altitude terrain-following passes at a consistent three meters above the glacier surface, the altitude required for clean signal penetration through the debris layer. The team validated their airborne measurements against physical excavations and drill cores, and the debris thickness readings matched, confirming the method as reliable and field-ready.
The results were striking. At Sourdough, the system revealed ice depths reaching 28.5 meters. At Galena Creek, GPR detected landform thicknesses of up to 48.6 meters in terrain that ground crews had previously classified as inaccessible. Beyond measuring total thickness, the drone’s proximity to the surface allowed researchers to assess ice purity and identify internal rocky layers invisible to orbital radar, layers that represent distinct climate cycles stretching back centuries or millennia. What had been a safety liability utilizing traditional boots on the ground methods became a repeatable, high-fidelity aerial survey with a scope that no ground-based team could match.
Central to the success of the project was UgCS SkyHub and its True Terrain Following technology. Rather than relying on pre-loaded Digital Elevation Models to approximate surface height, SkyHub uses real-time radar altimeter data to keep the drone at a precise, consistent altitude above the actual ground surface regardless of how dramatically that surface changes beneath the aircraft. On a rock glacier, where the terrain can shift sharply within a single flight line, this distinction is not insignificant and can make the difference between capturing high quality, usable data and noise. The same principle applies to any active sensor that ties data quality to altitude stability — lidar included — making the glacier project a compelling proof of concept for the broader platform.
UgCS 6.0 Introduces Large Area Splitting for Multi-Flight Surveys
The rock glacier project illustrates what SPH Engineering’s hardware and terrain-following stack can do at the platform and sensor level. But as drone surveys have scaled from research plots to multi-square-kilometer industrial campaigns, a different class of problem has emerged. One encountered not in-flight, but in the planning workflow.
Large-scale aeromagnetic surveys used in mineral exploration, oil and gas reconnaissance, pipeline tracing, and geological mapping routinely cover areas that no single drone battery can handle. Until recently, there was no unified tool capable of managing the full scope of such a campaign. Survey teams planned flight lines in one application, exported KML files to a second, managed battery swaps and field logistics in a third, and dealt with data misalignment between sub-areas after the fact.
UgCS 6.0, released in June 2026, addresses this directly with a new feature set called Large Projects.
The centerpiece is Large Area Splitting. An operator draws or imports a single polygon defining the full survey boundary, then divides it into flyable sub-areas within UgCS. Critically, the survey line grid remains perfectly consistent across all sub-areas, eliminating the misalignment errors that previously crept in when teams stitched together separately planned flight segments. Sub-areas can be further cut, merged, or individually converted to standard routes for waypoint-level fine-tuning, without disturbing the broader project structure.
Complementing this is a Tie Lines feature that places perpendicular validation lines across the entire project at a user-defined frequency. This is a standard QA/QC requirement for aeromagnetic data that previously had to be built by hand or managed separately. A “shift right” parameter allows the full flight line grid to be offset as a single adjustment, making it straightforward to align new campaigns with historical survey lines imported as KML. For repeat surveys common in mining, the same claim block may be flown multiple times as models are refined. This turns a post-processing correction into a planning-time decision.
Rounding out the new release, per-sub-area flight time reporting lets crews identify battery endurance issues before mobilizing to the field, and multiple take-off point assignments support coordinated multi-vehicle operations across large sites. The current Large Projects framework is optimized for magnetic survey workflows, with lidar survey planning on the roadmap for a future release.
The update also introduces Smart AGL 2.0, an enhanced terrain-following algorithm that now checks safe clearance not just below and ahead of the drone, but to its sides as well — a meaningful safety improvement for surveys near ridgelines, embankments, or any terrain with significant lateral relief.
Built for Complex Drone Survey Missions at Scale
SPH Engineering has positioned UgCS since its founding as one of the most specialized and capable software suites available for professional operations in demanding environments. The collaboration with the University of Arizona for mapping rock glaciers illustrates how navigation and sensor-level innovations can overcome safety and accessibility hurdles in terrain too dangerous to navigate, and shows what that looks like in practice. As survey projects continue to grow in complexity and scale, the lessons learned from operating in some of Earth’s most demanding environments are increasingly relevant across the geospatial industry. The planning and logistics capabilities introduced in UgCS 6.0 represent a direct outflow from those insights, bringing innovation that could someday enable a survey on Mars, to the day-to-day demands of large-scale drone operations.
Discussion Questions
For geospatial professionals:
- Which do you think will have the greater impact on future drone operations: smarter autonomous flight or more advanced sensor payloads?
- As drone surveys continue to scale, what do you see as the biggest remaining challenge: flight planning, sensor integration, battery limitations, or data processing?
For students:
- The article explains that debris can hide thick layers of ice. Why is it important for scientists to understand what’s below the surface, not just what they can see?
- The article describes rock glaciers as analogs for similar features on Mars. How can studying Earth’s landscapes help scientists prepare for future space exploration?
- Why do you think the researchers compared the drone data with drill cores before trusting the results?
Learn More: Drowning in Data, but Starving for Maps in the Deep Blue Sea
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