Live public-orbit data.
EmberSat train illustrative.
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EmberSat constellation — notional
Public sensors fused today
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. Next, an ISS-hosted system and focused satellite constellation are designed to drive image-to-alert time below five minutes over the places at greatest risk.
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 is a software, hardware, and data company. Our software has operated autonomously at scale on public satellite data. The camera belongs to our NAU partners and is returning imagery from interplanetary space. We integrate our software with their camera first in a hosted ISS payload, then build focused proprietary-data constellations.
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.
A hosted thermal-plus-RGB payload flight on the International Space Station will test the full EmberSat wildfire-detection chain in orbit. The planned layer after that is a five-satellite Arizona-corridor pilot with proprietary data.
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.
After a satellite takes the picture, data still has to be downlinked, processed, reviewed, and delivered. EmberSat attacks each delay: autonomous detection on live public feeds today, onboard triage that decides what matters before downlink, and mission geometry that keeps sensors over fire country instead of spreading them across the globe.
The camera side of EmberSat's flight program is led at Northern Arizona University by Christopher Edwards, with Chris Haberle and Michael Shafer.
Their VISIONS instrument is returning imagery aboard NASA's ESCAPADE mission, and their camera is TRL 9. We work side by side at NAU, giving EmberSat close access to the team, camera technology, and flight experience behind it.
EmberSat brings the wildfire software, mission architecture, ground infrastructure, and alert delivery. The proposed ISS flight is designed to qualify that integrated wildfire system around the NAU partners' already-proven camera.
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.
Fire Operations
Captain with the Flagstaff Fire Department and a working firefighter. Keeps the product honest: every alert, threshold, and report is shaped by what a crew can actually act on.
Coordinator
Runs coordination and operations across EmberSat's programs, working full-time with Arizona's emergency-management and forestry agencies.
Christopher Edwards leads the camera side of the flight program at NAU, with Chris Haberle and Michael Shafer. Their VISIONS instrument is returning imagery from interplanetary space aboard NASA's ESCAPADE mission. EmberSat works with the team to bring that NAU-developed camera into an integrated wildfire-detection system.
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.
