NASA's High-Tech Wildfire Weapons
Article in cnn.com/technology
Updated 1:55 p.m. EDT, Fri October 26, 2007
“It’s kind of like going to the weather channel for fire,” says Dan Mandl, the EO-1 mission manager at NASA. “Every sensor in the world becomes a data feed, and we’re using RSS technology [so] anyone can locate and subscribe to it.”
Instead of having people intercept the data, the process has become automated, which speeds up the information-gathering process, Mandl says. An image from the EO1 used to take two weeks to analyze, but the first images from the fire in Southern California were analyzed in less than 10 hours.
“The fire workers need to have as much data as possible about the location of the fires,” Mandl says, “because the big problem is that fires don’t stay still.”