Fires spotted from space
Posted: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 7:19 PM by Alan Boyle
Pictures from on high are documenting the spread of California's wildfires and may help experts figure out how to fight them more efficiently.
Bigelow Aerospace |
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Plumes of smoke move out to sea from
Southern California in a picture from
Bigelow Aerospace's Genesis 1 module.
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NASA's Earth-watching satellites are tracking the lengthening plumes of smoke, as are cameras aboard Bigelow Aerospace's privately funded Genesis 1 orbital module. And today, NASA also sent its remote-controlled Ikhana airplane above the inferno - an experiment that literally serves as a trial by fire for the scientific drone.
NASA is working with the U.S. Forest Service as well as the National Interagency Fire Center to get pictures of the catastrophic blazes to firefighting commanders within mere minutes.
"They use it to make sure they're putting the engines and the boots on the ground in the right place," Matt Fladeland, airborne science manager at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told me today.
First, NASA experts check the pictures from satellites such as Aqua or Terra, which are equipped with infrared imagers that can point up hot spots. That serves as a guide for the Ikhana plane - which is basically a Predator drone modified for scientific reconnaissance rather than counterterrorism.
NASA via AP |
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This image from NASA's Terra satellite
shows thick smoke wafting from
Southern California over the Pacific.
The red spots denote fire activity.
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The plane, which uses instruments and software developed at Ames, is flown remotely by operators at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California's Mojave Desert. The Federal Aviation Administration usually doesn't allow drones to fly in the national airspace, but Ikhana has been given special dispensation because of the magnitude of the crisis and the contribution that the system can make.
Ikhana can capture imagery in visible as well as thermal infrared wavelengths, process the photos automatically and send them down to a command center. The infrared view can cut through the smoke to pinpoint fires that human eyes couldn't spot.
Within 10 or 15 minutes, the key images are distributed to the national fire center and incident commanders, via FTP sites and a Google Earth interface.
Fladeland said an online chat forum has been set up for managers to alert each other about new hot spots to watch - as well as places where the tide has turned and no additional resources are required.
Jim Brass, NASA's co-project manager of the Wildfire Research and Applications Partnership, said the plane was designed to put in hours of service under conditions that would be too "dull, dirty and dangerous" for human pilots.
NASA |
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This 3-D perspective combines imagery from Digital
Globe and Google Earth with readings from NASA's
remote-controlled Ikhana airplane. The hottest hot
spots show up in white and red, while blue indicates
areas that have already burned. Click on the
image to see a slide show about California's fires.
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"We're flying through a lot of smoke - a pretty dangerous place to have a pilot flying for a long period of time," he told me. Today, Ikhana was scheduled to fly for 10 hours straight, going as high as 23,000 feet in altitude. It will likely be sent out for another long shift on Thursday.
Brass recalled an earlier tryout of the Ikhana system in the Bay Area, where a fire manager breathed a sigh of relief after seeing the airborne imagery. He said the team leader told him, "This has saved us a million dollars, and I can sleep tonight because I know our backfire has worked."
"His next question was, 'Can we trust this?'" Brass said. "Yes, you can."
Fladeland said the current operation is the culmination of five years of research into the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for environmental imaging. NASA was actually in the process of wrapping up the Ikhana experiment when federal fire officials asked for help on Monday.
"It rapidly went from a research sort of thing to an actual application," Fladeland said.
Check MSNBC's Space News section on Thursday for my first dispatch from the International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight in New Mexico.
