Galileo Mining Ltd (ASX:GAL) has completed one diamond drill hole at its Lantern South prospect in Western Australia’s Fraser Range region.

The Fraser Range project spans 602km² of prospective ground across two zones:

• Lantern and Delta Blues nickel prospects: Northern Fraser Range, 15km from the Trans-Australia Railway
• Empire Rose nickel and gold prospect: Southern Fraser Range, 10km from the Eyre Highway

GAL is drilling priority nickel targets in the highly prospective Fraser Range nickel belt in WA.

It is here where Sirius Resources’ discovered the Nova nickel deposit in 2012 – a 14.4Mt at 2.3% nickel, 0.9% copper resource. That discovery led to Independence Group’s (ASX: IGO) acquisition of Sirius and the Nova Nickel-Copper Project in a $1.8 billion takeover deal.

In 2018, Silver Knight discovered its famed nickel-copper deposit, which belongs to the privately-owned Creasy Group.

GAL’s exploration team helped discover the Silver Knight deposit.

In 2019, GAL’s Fraser Range neighbour, Legend Mining Ltd (ASX: LEG) unearthed a massive nickel sulphide-copper discovery at its Rockford Project’s Mawson Prospect. There was much talk of it being the “next Nova discovery”.

You can see the proximity of each of these projects to GAL in the map above, however also of note is that famed prospector, Mark Creasy, has been integral to each of these discoveries and is a major shareholder of Galileo which he also founded.

Latest results look promising

While the last hole drilled was a disappointment, it was one of many in a planned drilling program.

This most recent hole was completed to check for mineralisation beneath RC drill hole LARC012 and to establish a platform for down hole EM surveying.

So far it is pointing to positive results.

Two zones of heavily disseminated sulphide were intercepted within drill hole LADD003 from 110.5m to 111.35m and from 169m to 171.3m. Sulphides were predominantly pyrrhotite (iron sulphide) with minor pentlandite (nickel sulphide) and minor chalcopyrite (copper sulphide).

GAL will glean valuable information from detailed structural and lithological logging of all drill core. This will assist with the understanding of the occurrence and nature of the mineralisation and benefit future drill targeting at the Lantern Prospects and within Galileo tenements over the surrounding area.

Downhole EM surveying at the Lantern South and Lantern East prospects will be completed to look for off- hole conductive targets that could represent significant accumulations of massive sulphides.

Over at the Delta Blues prospect, infill EM surveying has resulted in updated models for two targets at DB1 and DB2.

DB1 displays a particularly strong conductivity of 11,000 Siemens and DB2 also has a high modelled conductivity of 3,300 Siemens. While conductive targets can have multiple sources, it is encouraging that weathered sulphides have been recorded in aircore drilling less than 400 metres away from DB1.

Target DB1 occurs approximately 4km along strike from Legend Mining’s Crean Prospect, where drilling has identified ultramafic intrusive rock units prospective for nickel sulphide mineralisation.

Meanwhile target DB2 occurs less than 300 metres from sulphides intersected in drilling by S2 Resources.

“We have completed our first diamond drilling program of the year at Lantern East and Lantern South, and continue to build up new targets for drill testing at our highly prospective Fraser Range Project,” Galileo Managing Director Brad Underwood said.

“The drilling results show that we have sulphides occurring in the right geological environment on our tenements. This means that we have the correct components required to form a mineral deposit and we will continue to aggressively explore for economic mineralisation.

“We have developed good quality nickel targets from our initial work over the previous two years on this greenfields project. Our drilling programs in 2021 are designed to test these targets with the aim of making new discoveries.”