Flying fire sensor could help track wildfires from a satellite

As wildfires currently hit western North America, a new airborne project team hopes to develop a space solution to stop conflagrations before they get out of control.

The project will fund spotter planes with infrared detectors — heat-seeking sensors to examine flame length and geometry to learn more about how fires spread. Meanwhile, machine learning algorithms — provided they are trained well on other hot spot" datasets — could spot new fires in the region within milliseconds, to send alerts.