Starting in late 2005 the "Friedrichshafen" was based in Jwaneng, a diamond mining town in southern Botswana, where it conducted an airborne geophysical survey on behalf of De Beers Prospecting Botswana. The airship was moved from Amsterdam to Cape Town by ship and then flown to Gaborone where a Lockheed Martin full tensor gravity gradiometer was installed. This instrument, owned and operated by Bell Geospace, measures changes in the Earth's gravity field associated with geological density variations. The technology is based on accelerometers and the data quality is sensitive to the turbulence and motion usually associated with fixed wing aircraft installations. The airship, flying slowly at night in relatively cool calm air, provides a very stable and vibrationally quiet platform. The resulting data is capable of revealing the rather faint gravity signals associated with Kimberlite pipes – a source of diamonds – buried under the Kalahari sands. This survey came to an end on 20 September 2007, when "D-LZFN" was irreparably damaged by a whirlwind while moored at its mast.