That's a TON of passes for such a large survey area.  E/W grid lines will only be 820 feet apart. N/S will be 9,800 feet apart.  Guesstimating that the survey area is at least 100 miles long N/S, that's around 645 E/W flights alone. A little surprised they can't use drones for this type of work.

^It sounds like the aircraft will be absolutely jam-packed with sensors and some of them require spacing. Looks as though the aircraft has some substantial wingtip extensions. And the tail "stinger" could be a quite lengthy boom indeed. Maybe there are sync issues that you'd run into trying to coordinate all those instruments spread between four or five drones. I'm pretty sure commercial drones are used for geosciences. But I expect you can still get more and better data if you have more and bigger instruments strapped together onto a single frame. Incidentally, there've been mapping flights in and out of both Lambert and Parks in the last day or two. I wonder if they're a part of this project.