HotSpot: A Real-time, Broad Area Wildfire Monitoring System Enabled by a Rapidly Deployable Stratospheric Remote Sensing Balloon

Urban Sky is an aerospace startup that develops innovative stratospheric flight and remote sensing systems. For this Phase I STTR, Urban Sky, in collaboration with the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB), is proposing a feasibility study into the development of a real-time, broad-area, unmanned Stratospheric remote sensing system for high-resolution wildfire and heat source mapping. By leveraging the high vantage point and operational advantages of the Stratosphere, this system would enable high-resolution, real-time heat source and intensity mapping above wildfires for first responders, including the Air Force’s firefighting C-130 airtankers and Wildland Fire Branch. This system is also broadly applicable to other DoD applications requiring high-resolution heat source mapping in real-time above remote AOIs. Under this Phase I STTR, Urban Sky would conduct customer discovery and needs assessment analysis with potential Air Force, DoD and Civil Government users. Additionally, Urban Sky and UCB would jointly conduct a technical study into key early-stage research questions, revolving around a system ability to 1) accurately approximate the location of hotspots within an image, 2) approximate the ground location of that image on Earth using only on-board IMU data, and 3) condense that location data into a small enough packet for real-time downlink.