'THERE'S THIS FIRE MOVING VERY FAST ACROSS THE ATLANTIC'

摘要

In January 2017, one of the government's newest weather satellites picked up the most bizarre signal: a wildfire moving at breakneck speeds across the Atlantic Ocean. Now, wildfires don't spread across the ocean, and they certainly don't move at the pace being reported. What was going on? It turns out the satellite - one of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES-R series - had accidentally detected a rocket launch off the Florida coast, mistaking the fiery exhaust of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket for a wildfire. "It was actually - honest - by accident, where we saw a rocket launch on the East Coast of Florida," LSHarris Technologies' president of space systems, Bill Gattle, told C4ISRNET. "Our weather sensor actually sent a trigger and said there's a fire - our weather sensor actually tracks forest fires or hot spots - and today there's this fire moving very fast across the Atlantic and so they ought to go put it out."