Spire and OroraTech to Collaborate in Tracking Wildfires

Space services, data, and analytics company Spire Global, and thermal intelligence company OroraTech, announced that they will be working together on a constellation of eight satellites focused on monitoring global temperatures and wildfires. According to the news release, this will be “the first and largest constellation of satellites dedicated to tracking and monitoring wildfires,” and is scheduled to be put into orbit by 2024.

Spire Global and OroraTech’s announcement is timely on both fronts. Due to out-of-control wildfires in Canada’s provinces of Ontario and Quebec, American and Canadian cities in the region have regularly been choked with smoke. New York City briefly had the world’s worst air quality in early June due to the smoke, and Toronto claimed the same title on June 28th. In turn, July 4th may well have been Earth’s hottest day on record, owing to anthropogenic climate change. Aside from the threat to life, the financial toll of global wildfire losses between 2018 and 2022 was estimated to total $69 billion: including property and infrastructure damage, health-related expenses, and economic losses in sectors like forestry, energy, and tourism.

This isn’t the companies’ first collaboration on wildfire tracking. The companies worked together to launch the FOREST-1 (Forest Observation and Recognition Experimental Smallsat Thermal Detector) satellite in 2022, and the FOREST-2 satellite in 2023. The new collaboration will bring the total number of FOREST satellites up to eight. 

While FOREST-1 was initially intended to be a technology demonstration, Spire General Manager Frank Frulio told SpaceRef over email that the satellite “exceeded expectations and is now serving as an active fire monitoring instrument for customers across the globe.” He added that FOREST-2 featured upgrades including “a proprietary thermal-infrared optical payload and data processing unit” that yields “higher resolution, upgraded processing and two times the swath of thermal imaging to be gathered from space than its predecessor.” 

One of the customers that OroraTech and Spire are helping is Quebec’s fire agency, SOPFEU. An OroraTech spokesperson told SpaceRef over email that its wildfire solution platform was “the sole and most important tool SOPFEU used to keep situational awareness all over the province.” The platform was also used along with FOREST-1 imagery to track the early development of the Quebec wildfires.

According to Frulio, the new satellites will not just monitor active wildfires like those in Quebec; they will “identify and monitor areas at risk of wildfires, as well as enable early detection of wildfire hot spots.” The data from the satellites will be used in concert with OroraTech’s technology for “risk assessment, early detection, real-time monitoring, and damage analysis.”

Spire and OroraTech have also recently announced that they will be working together to fulfill a contract with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to demonstrate wildfire detection methods from space. Doing so will be a first step towards the CSA’s planned WildFireSat mission, which according to the announcement “aims to monitor all active wildfires in Canada from space on a daily basis to support wildfire management, provide Canadians with more precise information on smoke and air quality conditions, and more accurately measure the carbon emitted by wildfires.” 

Unlike the methane-monitoring company GHGSat, which transitioned away from operating its own satellites to take advantage of Spire’s Space-as-a-Service offerings to place payloads on shared satellite buses that Spire operates, OroraTech will continue to use dedicated satellites for its new constellation. Frulio said that the company hasn’t yet decided on a launch provider for these satellites, but that it has multi-launch-agreements already in place with launch providers that will give Spire and OroraTech flexibility to make decisions closer to launch time and avoid any launch scheduling issues. 

OroraTech gave credit to Spire’s service model for enabling this constellation. Axel Roenneke, OroraTech’s chief commercial officer, said in Spire’s release that the model “proved invaluable in moving us quickly towards our goal,” and that it can “rapidly bring new customers like ourselves to the vantage point of space within a few months of contract signature.”  

On Spire’s part, Frulio said in the announcement that “I can’t think of a more important and critical application than protecting our environment, people and property from destructive wildfires.”