From September to the end of October, a NASA thermal- infrared scanning instrument will stand ready to support the U.S. Forest Service and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection with real-time imagery of fire characteristics.
In 2006, with the AMS mounted in the General Atomics Aeronautical Systems’ Altair unmanned aircraft, NASA provided real-time fire information to the incident management team on the Esperanza Fire near Banning, California. From 2007 to 2009, the AMS flew on NASA’s Ikhana unmanned aircraft gathering information about wildfires for incident team leaders and to support research on fire behaviour and post-fire recovery.
Although the Ikhana missions were valuable, the investigators didn’t have the ease of use that a manned aircraft offered. In order to realize easier access to the National Airspace System, scientists turned to the manned NASA Beechcraft B200 King Air aircraft this year for routine mission operations.
The use of the Autonomous Modular Sensor (AMS) sensor to support wildfire incident management personnel, will provide benefits to the people of California by enabling CAL FIRE to derive near-real-time information on major wildfire events, helping to save time, resources, property and potentially lives,” said Vince Ambrosia of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., the project¹s principal Investigator.
While in the air, the scanner collects imagery for real-time, on-board, autonomous analysis and creation of fire products for delivery through a satellite communications system to servers at NASA Ames. From there, the data is made available in many web service formats, including formats viewable within the Google Earth visualization tool.
The aircraft with the AMS installed flies over the fire and collects spectral and thermal information about the fire and the surrounding landscape characteristics. This data is used by incident managers on the ground to plan mitigation strategies and fight the fire.
Source: Kansas City InfoZine