There have been more than 4,000 wildfires in California this year, including January’s deadly fires near LA. Now, Google and satellite company Muon Space are working to prevent that from happening again.
They’re launching fire-spotting satellites into space, hoping they’ll detect fires more quickly and help crews learn more about how flames spread.
"We’ll be able to see fires that are smaller than a swimming pool. You can think about it sort of like roughly five by five meters. So, that’s sort of, you know, at least ten times, close to 100 times smaller than any of the existing satellite systems can see," said Muon Space CEO Jonny Dyer.
Muon Space and Google’s collective mission is to help firefighters respond to wildfires more quickly and equip them with better tools.
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"Fire Sat is explicitly designed with very high-resolution thermal cameras. They can see fires when they’re small really early in their life, but also can map them out once they get very large," said Dyer.
Muon Space launched its first satellite in March. By 2030, the company plan to finish their final constellation of 52 satellites, providing global coverage and producing new thermal photos of fire-prone areas every 20 minutes.
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"Basically, what we’ll actually get to fire agencies is not those pictures though. We’ll give them higher-level products, things like perimeter…we’ll give them products like intensity maps, so you can think about sort of like a heat map of how hot is this fire burning right here," said Dyer.
The company’s partners are also confident these satellites will provide a big boost for wildfire education, response, and prevention.
"We will be able to see the full evolution of fires from when they start to when they finish, and that helps us model fires better," said Google Climate and Energy Research lead Christopher Van Arsdale.
Some fire agencies are excited about the new opportunities these satellites may bring.
"We need to understand how hot fires are to understand where we can attenuate or tune our suppression strategies…this will help us target strategic extra suppression efforts like air tankers and firefighters, autonomous helicopters, whatever the future is going to bring for us," said retired California State Fire Marshal Kate Dargan.
Kate Dargan worked with Cal Fire for 30 years and witnessed firsthand the devastation wildfires can cause.
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"That’s why it will be, I even hesitate to use the word game changer because firefighting isn’t a game, but it will be a huge change for the firefighting community," said Dargan.
Muon Space and Google will release the first images of fires captured by the satellite later this month.
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The three satellites scheduled for launch in March will send new information back to Earth every 12 hours.
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