Google wants to launch a battalion of satellites into orbit around the Earth to monitor fires on the ground in real time, then collect all that photographic data and use AI to better identify fires in their critical early stages.
Fire Sat is a partnership between Google, the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance, and the satellite builder Muon Space. The collaborative effort was announced in 2024 with the goal of launching satellites specifically designed to spot wildfires. The first satellite of the proposed 50-plus strong constellation launched in March 2025.
The group hopes to get the full constellation up there by 2029. Then, the satellites will be able to orbit the Earth, snapping images of every fire-prone place on the globe. The photos would be captured about 15 minutes apart, enough to catch a small fire before it grows too big, or to observe the progress of an active blaze.The information about a fire’s location could then be beamed to data analysts and machine intelligence systems on the ground more quickly than ever.
“We want to make sure that we can learn fast to be able to detect and track fires,” Brian Collins, the executive director of the Earth Fire Alliance, says. “We want to transform the way the world and the United States looks at fire.”
This group’s effort isn’t the only mission to put fire-tracking satellites into orbit right now. The Canadian WildfireSat program is a government-funded effort to launch its own fire-specific satellites dedicated to monitoring blazes across the country. In the 2025 fire season so far, nearly 9 million acres have already burned in the fires active in Canada. But the launch of Canada’s fire satellites is still a ways off, slated for launch in 2029. Google wants to get into space more quickly—and use its AI chops to speed up the process of figuring out when fires start.
Satellites already in orbit have been snapping pics of wildfires for years. Google has incorporated data collected by NOAA weather satellites to show wildfire boundaries and evacuation zones in Maps. But detecting fires from space—especially small ones or fires that are just starting—can be tricky. Satellites currently in orbit tend to detect heat with microbolometer sensors, thermal imaging chips that, unlike other thermal cameras, don’t require cooling. The problem with that, says Christopher Van Arsdale, a researcher at Google, is that microbolometer images can have a narrow field of view and come back with grainier, lower-resolution images. That can make detecting fires in their earlier stages hard, because lots of heat signatures on the ground—hot roofs or even light reflected off water surfaces—can look very similar to wildfires to a thermal camera.
“If you look at a noisy picture, everything kind of looks like a tiny fire,” Van Arsdale says. “So you have to really know what you're looking at for that to be useful. You need these very high-fidelity pictures in order to actually do a good job with detection.”