For All Humankind With NASA
 

FOR THE ENVIRONMENT...Fighting Forest Fires

Forest Among the many uses for NASA satellite remote sensing technology is the location and mapping of forest fires. This capability gives United States Forest Service (USFS) firefighters an improved chance of containing the fires.

The latest forest fire imaging system is called Firefly. Firefly was developed by the USFS and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and put into operation by the USFS in 1993.

The Firefly system includes an aircraft that uses an infrared scanner to identify fire boundaries and “hot spots”. The airborne sensor penetrates smoke to obtain an image of the fire area. Firefly uses global positioning satellite (GPS) navigation data for positioning accuracy. Fire location and boundary data are processed on board the aircraft. Fire maps are transmitted to a portable field computer at the firefighters’ camp within 30 minutes of “snapping the picture”.

The ground computer is linked to the aircraft via digital communications equipment developed by the USFS. The digital image processing techniques are products of JPL’s 25 years of experience in processing and enhancing spacecraft pictures of distant planets.