  The end of 2019 marked a bushfire crisis for Australia that affected more
than 100000km2 of land and destroyed more than 2000 houses. Here, we propose a
method of in-orbit bushfire detection with high efficiency to prevent a
repetition of this disaster. An LEO satellite constellation is first developed
through NSGA-II (Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II), optimising for
coverage over Australia. Then edge computing is adopted to run a bushfire
detection algorithm using several constellation satellites as edge nodes to
reduce fire detection time. A geostationary satellite is used for
inter-satellite communications, such that an image taken by a satellite can be
distributed among several satellites for processing. The geostationary
satellite also maintains a constant link to the ground, so that a bushfire
detection can be reported back without any significant delay. Overall, this
system is able to detect fires that span more than 5m in length, and can make
detections in 1.39s per image processed. This is faster than any currently
available bushfire detection method.
