Title: The Compact Fire Imager (CFI)
Presenting Author: Douglas Morton
Organization: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Co-Author(s): Murzy Jhabvala, James MacKinnon, Shane Coffield, Yang Chen, Jennifer Balch, James Randerson

Abstract:
Fires continue to grow hotter, faster, and more destructive in a warmer world. There is an urgent need for new observations of extreme fires to understand and anticipate rapid changes in fire risk, to detect and track individual fire events, and to evaluate fire impacts on ecosystems and communities. With support from NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), we are developing the Compact Fire Imager (CFI) to deliver unsaturated multi-spectral measurements at high spatial resolution in a form factor that is compatible with the size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints for NASA’s next-generation airborne platforms. The CFI airborne imager uses innovative Strained-Layer Superlattice (SLS) detector technology and a custom butcher block filter to acquire imagery in six spectral bands for fire detection and characterization between the shortwave infrared (SWIR) and thermal infrared (TIR) using a single detector. Our team is also designing an onboard processing module to deliver fire products in near-real time for fire management—a critical step to enable the autonomous operation of CFI on unmanned aerial systems (UAS), including high altitude long endurance (HALE) platforms that could be deployed to support NASA’s Wildland FireSense Project. Here, we report the status of CFI subsystem development, testing, and integration. In addition, we will outline the core capabilities of the onboard processing hardware and initial machine learning model performance for real-time fire detection and characterization.