FireSense Satellite Fleet

In April 2025, NASA’s FireSense Project co-led campaign activities in partnership with the Department of War (DoW) Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP), the DoW Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP), and the US Forest Service to conduct simultaneous ground, airborne, and spaceborne data collection on prescribed fires at Fort Stewart-Hunter Army Airfield. This coordinated effort to collect vegetation, fire, and smoke measurements aimed to enhance the understanding of fire behavior and smoke dynamics to improve support for proactive wildland fire management. The teams represent experts with focuses that range from vegetation and fuels to local weather and smoke behavior to fire behavior and energy. By integrating across these teams there is potential to assess and compare the validity of ground and airborne data in relation to a variety of spaceborne sensor datasets. The spaceborne sensors encompass a range of types including synthetic aperture radar, spaceborne LiDAR, imaging spectrometers, and more. With these sensors and subsequent data collection, products can be generated to capture fire radiative power, soil moisture, vegetative stress, active fire spread, fuel consumption, and air pollutants from wildfire smoke, to name a few. This is crucial, as it enables the creation of integrated datasets to identify areas of success and potential improvement, thereby advancing science and technologies for wildland fire management. For the activities at Fort Stewart, FireSense collaborated with agency partners to task public and commercial satellites for detailed data collection that will directly serve existing FireSense and NASA projects. These assets included, but are not limited to: GEDI, ECOSTRESS, EMIT, VIIRS, MODIS, GOES, TEMPO, Umbra, Capella, ICEYE, BlackSky, SkySat, SMAP, SMOS, Aura, Sentinel-1, Sentinel-5, and others.

The FireSense project is a multi-year initiative focused on developing and delivering trailblazing technology to help address challenges in wildland fire management. This is accomplished by working with operational agencies responsible for wildland fire management to mature and deliver NASA’s unique Earth science and technological capabilities. The FireSense project also conducts airborne observations over wildland fires and prescribed burn areas. This information supports fire management decisions and helps improve sensors, models, and datasets essential for effective wildland fire management. The FireSense project focuses on four uses cases to improve wildfire management, including the measurement of pre-fire conditions, active fire dynamics, post-fire impacts and threats, as well as air quality forecasting, all of which are co-developed with identified partners in wildland fire management.