Live public-orbit data.
EmberSat train illustrative.
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Public sensors used by our software today
Future EmberSat hardware — notional
Super-Early Wildfire Intelligence
EmberSat turns satellite observations into wildfire alerts crews can use. Our software has already run autonomously for nine days across 800,000 km². We are improving and deploying that software now. Dedicated sensing hardware can extend its speed and coverage as future funding allows.
Wildfire costs the United States on the order of $500 billion a year, all-in. Yet the moment when a fire is cheapest and safest to contain is still the hardest to see across large areas. Past roughly five acres, the odds of stopping a fire collapse below ten percent. About a quarter of fires escape initial attack, and those drive more than 85% of all area burned.
Today's satellites make operators choose. Geostationary weather satellites refresh in minutes but see large pixels. Polar imagers see finer detail but revisit less often. EmberSat is built around the number that matters at the fireground: minutes from image capture to a usable alert.
These figures are drawn from U.S. economic-impact and initial-attack research. Request the source memo.
EmberSat's software began as part of Team Snuffed's XPRIZE Wildfire entry, which the Flagstaff team carried to the finals. Alexander Shenkin then founded EmberSat, and the software now runs autonomously on public satellite data.
Built for the $11M Space-Based Detection and Intelligence track. Ran fully autonomous for nine days over 800,000 km² of New South Wales, entirely on public satellite data: no human in the loop, sixty active incidents on screen at once. Finals testing completed with the NSW Rural Fire Service in April 2026.
The same detection stack, rebuilt for GOES-West and the Flagstaff fire corridor: continuous monitoring, automated alerting, and a dispatcher portal, again on public satellite data.
Working with our partners at Katalyst Space Technologies, we have designed focused orbits for high-risk fire corridors. The planned constellation would combine thermal-plus-RGB sensing with EmberSat's software, targeting campfire-scale detection and actionable alerts within ten minutes. We are now in discussions with spacecraft bus providers to define the path to flight. These are design targets, not current performance.
Find new ignitions sooner, assess them automatically, and send dispatchers information they can use.
Watch long, ignition-prone corridors and terrain that camera networks do not cover.
Monitor vast, remote landscapes without building a dense ground network.
EmberSat continuously ingests live public satellite feeds, identifies and prioritizes likely ignitions, and delivers usable information to dispatchers. We are improving that operational chain now. Dedicated sensors and onboard triage are a future acceleration path if hardware funding becomes available.
Public satellites either cover a wide area at coarse resolution or provide detailed images only a few times a day. A dedicated thermal and RGB sensor over the fire corridor would provide detailed images more often. The target is to detect a fire at campfire scale and alert a crew within five minutes of the image being taken.
Katalyst Space Technologies, a Flagstaff mission-engineering firm, completed the orbital and cost baseline for the mission design.
A consortium is forming to build the hardware.
Founder & CEO
Remote sensing ecologist at Northern Arizona University, where he runs the Ecosystem Science and Innovation Lab. Engineering physics and electrical engineering at UCSD; engineering at CU Boulder; satellite communications R&D at Lockheed Martin; then ecology — Yale, a doctorate at Florida, a postdoc at Oxford. Nature co-author.
Program Director
Directs programs and operations across EmberSat, working full-time with Arizona's emergency-management and forestry agencies.
Flagstaff-based mission-engineering partner. Performed the orbital, mission, and cost baseline study behind our constellation figures.
Years of collaboration on remote sensing of vegetation stress through the Forest Health Protection program.
Flagstaff-based forest-monitoring overflights, using EmberSat data to prioritize where to look next.
