Space Gadgetry Adapted to Fighting Forest Fires

NASA scientists are adapting Space Age technology to the ancient problem of forest fires with a new flame-seeking device that spots blazes with the aid of orbiting satellites.

“This is a technology spinoff,” J. David Nichols of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena said of a new plan to use space program techniques and hardware to bolster firefighting equipment and strategy.

In a disaster such as the conflagrations that burned through large portions of Yellowstone National Park last summer, firefighting strategists will have crucial data on fire intensity, speed and location within minutes rather than the hours needed with current systems, Nichols said.

The project, a joint effort of JPL scientists and officials at the U.S. Forest Service, is known as Firefly and is expected within a couple of years to produce a device of that name ready for testing during an actual forest fire.

The infrared sensing and mapping device now under development at JPL will be mounted on a Forest Service airplane, Nichols, the project task manager, said, but will use the space-based Global Positioning System satellites for more accurate mapping of forest fires.

He said the system should be able to pinpoint even the smallest hot spot in the remotest of areas, then relay the information lightning-fast via airplane, communications satellites and ground-based monitors.

“We’re just starting the development of it,” Nichols said of Firefly. “We will be testing the system in the fire season of 1991 and we hope to have it operational in the fire season of 1992.

Forest fire season runs from April through October, Nichols said.

“Some of the technology such as using infrared sensors is the same as that used in spacecraft,” Nichols explained. “Some of the data-processing systems are also similar (to computer networks in spacecraft).”

Nichols added the system also draws on JPL developments in remote sensing and digital image processing used for enhancing spacecraft pictures of distant planets.

The system is being designed to transmit data directly from the system in the sky to the one on the ground in a computer-to-computer communication that will quickly produce maps of the blaze for strategists at a fire command post.

Nichols envisions the sensor of the Firefly system being mounted “into a cutout in the nose or belly portion of the aircraft with the rest of the electronics mounted inside.”

Current infrared survey systems, like the one used in the recent Yellowstone fires, capture data on film. The pilot surveying the fire then must land and turn over the film to a technician, working by hand, to interpret before strategists get a map of the blaze.