Next-Generation Satellites and Sensors Look to Speed Up Wildfire Response

The Los Angeles fires of early 2025, which left 29 people dead and destroyed more than 18,000 structures, have raised a lot of questions: What could have been done to prevent these fires from escalating? Were there inefficiencies in fire management response? To what extent did climate change play a role?

These are the questions that also keep a growing number of satellite industry stakeholders awake at night.

While large “megafires” are often the most noticeable fires in satellite imagery, “fast fires” like those that scorched the Pacific Palisades are on the rise. Propelled by strong winds, with blazes that spread at least six square miles per day, fast fires currently account for 3 percent of all wildfires in the U.S. but cause 89 percent of damage, 66 percent of deaths, and $18.9 billion in suppression costs.

A University of Colorado Boulder analysis of two decades of NASA satellite data suggests these types of fires will inevitably increase.

Brian Collins, executive director of the Earth Fire Alliance (EFA), a global, community-led, nonprofit focused on delivering real-time data from all wildfires on Earth says that high-intensity, fast-moving fires are increasing, especially in the Western part of the U.S.

“We think we understand the fire regime and how fires behave across the planet, but the available data is primarily from satellites and other collection methods that were not purpose-built for fire,” Collins says. “They were built for other purposes, and we’re still learning from that data, which is wonderful, but we’re starting to understand there’s also a lot we don't yet know about these types of fires.”

Christopher Anthony, EFA board member and former chief deputy director of CAL FIRE, agrees that we need both a better understanding of how fires are changing throughout the globe, as well as better technology that can help with fire detection, prevention, and response efforts.

“Today, firefighters and first responders primarily use ground-based camera systems and imagery from fixed-wing aircraft to understand what wildfires are doing and how they’re burning through the landscape,” Anthony tells Via Satellite. “The promise of near-real-time, high-fidelity satellite data and imagery on a rapid revisit is not being relied upon because that type of system purpose-built for all firefighters simply doesn’t exist yet.”

Following the devastating fires in California in 2017 and 2018, “we began to see the promise of utilizing satellite imagery for fire perimeter through the U.S. National Guard’s FireGuard program,” he continued. However, Anthony noted that while the FireGuard system is useful, it wasn’t designed specifically with wildfires and firefighters in mind. FireGuard uses military satellites with the National Interagency Fire Center, U.S. Forest Service and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Firefly capability to detect wildfires and notify authorities.

A number of satellite companies and initiatives like the FireSat constellation are geared toward wildfire response, and leaders hope that emerging technologies can help combat the next massive fire.

Chasing a Moving Target

One emerging player is Muon Space, a four-year-old space systems company that designs, builds, and operates satellites. In May 2024, the Mountain View, California, company announced its partnership with the EFA to build out a constellation of 52 small satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The initial phase of the aptly named “FireSat Constellation” is expected to launch three FireSats in 2026 producing twice-daily updates. The future 52-satellite constellation is designed to refresh data approximately every 20 minutes, with the most wildfire-prone regions (such as California) benefitting from sampling intervals as short as nine minutes.

The satellites are 150 kilogram smallsats equipped with a multispecral thermal infrared imager that has a large field of view.

“As they fly over, each satellite observes a 1,500-kilometer-wide swath on the ground, enabling very high-cadence coverage,” says Jonny Dyer, CEO and co-founder of Muon Space. “They continuously collect data over land areas, and downlink products within minutes via a hybrid network of commercial and dedicated ground stations.”

Muon Space recently deployed the FireSat Protoflight satellite on the SpaceX Transporter-13 mission on March 14.

To achieve data that refreshes every 20 minutes, as opposed to every 12 hours, which is typical of most weather satellites that monitor global hot spots, would not only save lives, but save billions of dollars in financial losses.

A recent report published by The Moore Foundation notes that if response times were reduced by just 15 minutes, the frequency of large uncontained fires could be reduced by up to seven percent. Hypothetically, that would generate $3.5 to $8.2 billion in economic benefits and $150 million to $350 million in fiscal benefits, the report stated.

The hope is that the FireSat network will put fire information into the hands of first responders and consumers quickly enough to make a difference: Save dwellings, save lives, and contain fires to minimize impact — in California and beyond.

“We think this is going to just be totally transformative,” says Dyer. “The way that fires are changing in the western United States is different than the way they’re changing in Africa, and it’s different than how they’re changing in the boreal forest at high latitudes, like in Canada. We’re going to suddenly open the door to this global, comprehensive view of all of that, that I think is going to just completely transform both the way we think about fire and the way that we interact with fire.”

Prevention Through Predictive Analytics

Dr. Martin Langer, CEO and CTO of OroraTech, likes to emphasize the difference between early detection of a wildfire and total prevention, when discussing his company, which was founded six years ago in Munich, Germany. OroraTech leverages thermal-sensing technology within a constellation of high-powered, miniaturized, shoebox-size satellites that monitors Earth’s infrared emissions. Its growing client base includes customers in commercial forestry, power line operators, and governments.

“What we’ve done from the beginning is thermal imaging from space. We see the Earth in thermal bands, which is similar to what snakes do,” said Langer. “We’re located in the so-called mid-wave and long-wave infrared band, so we see the Earth’s infrared emissions. This is great because you can spot fires that you can’t with the naked eye, see through smoke and clouds, and collect land surface and sea surface temperature readings from orbit.

Langer says OroraTech is primarily focused on the 2 percent of the fires that become extreme fires and cause 90 percent of all the damages.

“How do we identify them? How do you know in advance what kind of scenarios will lead to those fires becoming extreme fires? That’s what you can do in our platform and in an automated way,” says Langer.

Faster Decision Times

Orlando, Fla.-based MyRadar, a company founded in 2008, is better known for its popular weather app than for its fire-monitoring capabilities. But that may soon change.

In April 2024, MyRadar was selected as a Qualified Team in the XPRIZE Wildfire competition, which was launched to leverage cutting-edge technologies and innovative approaches to improve wildfire prevention, detection, and response.

The company has launched four prototype satellites for R&D and is now in the process of launching two Pathfinder satellites, says Sarvesh Garimella, chief scientist and CTO at MyRadar.

“Everything that we have tested is all going into these Pathfinder satellites [that] are launching in June, and so the current plan is to use those to compete in the XPRIZE wildfire finals, which is happening in August,” he says.

MyRadar’s goal is to launch 150 satellites in LEO, which will leverage its Orbital Wildfire Resilience (OWR) solution, based on patented, compact satellite technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deliver alerts through the MyRadar app.

Garimella says that 150 satellites in LEO will be able to provide sub-hourly monitoring capabilities to refresh the data often enough to detect wildfires. MyRadar’s satellites are projected to cost about $100,000 per satellite, including launch costs, he adds.

Garimella explains how the satellites will function as a ‘”tornado siren in the sky” to alert to wildfires.

“[Users] don’t need to downlink the image of the fire burning in order to tell you that there is a fire burning,” he says. Our onboard AI capabilities tell us what they see instead of having to show us what they see. This allows us to shrink the time from detection to decision, and also allows us to launch many, many more than we would have been able to in GEO.”

Bringing IoT to the Forest

Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO and co-founder of Dryad Networks, says GEO satellites offer a significant advantage over LEO: continuous monitoring. Dryad Networks, a five-year-old startup based in Berlin, Germany, operates $100 solar-powered gateway sensors, which function like an electronic nose attached to a tree, to detect fire in its incipient phases. The gateways can relay data either through terrestrial LTE and IoT networks, as well as the EchoStar Geostationary satellites, over North American or Europe to speed up wildfire detection.

In April 2024, Dryad announced it was awarded a 3.8 million euro ($4 million) grant from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), via Investitionsbank des Landes Brandenburg (ILB), to accelerate the development of its wildfire suppression project, codenamed “Florian” — an autonomous drone-based system designed to combat wildfires at their inception.

“If you have a dense grid of maybe every two or three acres, one of them, you can detect fires within the first 30 minutes from ignition, depending on how close the fire is, that can provide the critical time advantage to the firefighters to get to the to the fire before it spreads out of control and extinguish it,” Brinkschulte told Via Satellite in mid-February, while he was attending the Calforests Fire Strategy and Innovation Conference in Sacramento. “For fire, you need to be real time, or near real-time. Unless you have a density like the Starlink constellation, [LEO] will not give you real-time upload capabilities. We can’t wait an hour before the next LEO satellite is in view to transmit the alert of a fire.”

So far, the company’s sensors have prevented at least one potentially destructive fire in rural Lebanon from spreading. While no single solution can prevent all fires, all of the time, ultra early detection technologies, coupled with other solutions, will make an immense difference, he adds.

“Our vision is to build an end-to-end solution that can detect fires, provide situational awareness, and also aim to suppress the fire,” says Brinkschulte. “I once heard a fire chief say that even if we had put a fire truck into every driveway in L.A., we would not have been able to stop it. It really describes how unstoppable fire actually is once it reaches that stage. It’s not sufficient to say, ‘We need more firefighters, we need bigger planes, we need more helicopters, and then we will stop this.’ That is not the solution. We cannot respond our way out of this.”

Instead, we need to look at the things that happened before the catastrophe becomes a catastrophe, he adds.

“It is about mitigation, like clearing brushes [or] prescribed burning, to establish fire breaks, and all of those things to reduce the fuel load,” says Brinkschulte. “That’s what we think we can provide in this puzzle, this piece. We need to shorten the time for detection, and that’s our mission.” VS

Lead photo: NASA imagery shows smoke from the Palisades fire heading toward the Pacific Ocean on Jan. 7, 2025. NASA Earth Observatory images by Wanmei Liang, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview and modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2025) processed by the European Space Agency.