Rapid bushfire detection was promised after the Black Summer fires. It may have hit a roadblock

In late 2019, as bushfires lit up Australia's east coast, Simon Jones received an urgent call from the Victorian Country Fire Authority. Professor Jones, who's not involved with Fire Shield, said the technology was "nowhere near" good enough at the moment. In June this year, Minderoo The global competition has two categories: Teams will have one minute to accurately detect all fires across a landscape "larger than entire states or countries" Teams have 10 minutes to autonomously detect and suppress a high-risk fire in a 1,000 square meter area Both these goals were "immensely challenging," Professor Jones said. "If you have a LEO satellite go overhead and it's cloudy at that point in time, you miss an observation," Professor Jones said. "Low-Earth orbit satellites with fit-for-purpose fire monitoring sensors and near-real time image processing and analytics can provide unprecedented situational awareness of bushfires at state, national or even global scales,” she said.