Newbie needing advice on - Airborne MD for UAV drone to detect crashed aircraft

Hi all,
My first post here - hope I have found the right place. Any help would be appreciated.

I have a question on what sort of MD design would be appropriate to be slung under a UAV drone aircraft that flies at 150ft (constant) above terrain searching for a crashed aircraft?
The mass of the target would be >50kg, let's say 2 meters diameter pieces and of course mainly aluminum. Surface survey only, no underground is required.
The altitude is fixed as I don't want the UAV flying into regulated airspace which begins at 500ft.

The proposed idea is that the drone is dispatched to search a pre-programmed grid area and record the GPS location of any hits as well as taking a series of high resolution JPEG images at the moment of trigger.
Upon return the data is down-loaded and reviewed. The UAV is also capable of transmitting a signal at that event, identifying it's location. 

I have tried to find info on the web for this but really have drawn a blank. Mostly it's just chatter and patent registration junk.
I'm sure it exists in some form (probably military which won't make it onto the web as far as design goes) so thought I'd search the forums for help.
This site appears well established, friendly and with a bit of that creative "McGuyver" spirit so I'm hoping I might get lucky.

The motive behind this is two-fold, there is an obvious use for it in modern 24hr search & rescue for planes & boats but I also happen to work near some old aerial battlefields.
I believe there are still aircraft wrecks not yet discovered due to foliage coverage and this is a relatively cheaper method of searching.

Any help on the best type to use and system designs would be great. We can modify any type of commercial unit to trigger the data logger, camera and transmitter.

Once we understand the size and weight of the equipment, the UAV design is simple to calculate.

Thanks in advance - Phil






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Thank you GD,
I'll head down that path to review what can be found.
I was under the impression Magnetometers were related to ferrous metal but I'll certainly look deeper.
I see there was a lot of that discussion in a child forum here so I'll spend some reading time there.

Thank you so much for your quick response and welcome.
With some luck and good advice we may be onto something.

Best Regards - Phil

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http://www.thunting.com/smf/index.php/topic,38882.msg239820.html#msg239820

Welcome from NM.

I Seen one of these flying over Southern Arizona one day .

Had a Hell of a Time finding out Who or What it was.

Contact them and maybe, Just Maybe they will slip and give you some leads.

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