A Colorado startup floats the idea of using heat-seeking microballoons to track threatening blazes.
Daniel Roa and Max McLaughlin pull over near the dusty intersection of County Road 80C and Deadman Road in northern Colorado. Their white pickup truck, which their employer got on Craigslist, carries a few tanks of helium, a black trunk packed full of instruments, and a yellow barrel stuffed with a deflated balloon.
An Urban Sky tech deploys a microballoon from a pickup truck—a level of mobility that’s rare in surface-monitoring tech.Out at the launch point, near a spot called Jimmy Creek, Roa and McLaughlin are preparing to try out Urban Sky’s “Hotspot” system, which takes infrared data of Earth’s surface and processes it, precisely mapping unusually warm areas for people on the ground.
Company co-founders Andrew Antonio and Jared Leidich review stratospheric data from a prior flight.It’s information that can be challenging to get with conventional methods. The US government has satellites, including those with instruments called MODIS and VIIRS, that spot sparks from space. Their data, which comes from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is free and public, and sometimes leads to fire identification before anyone calls 911.
Soon it is gone, rising to nearly 11 miles above sea level. From there, the Hotspot device ideally will show the Air Force—by pinpointing places that are warmer than others—that Urban Sky will be able to tell where a fire is and isn’t. Roa and McLaughlin start driving eastward, to where Urban Sky software predicts the balloon will land.
What shows up is a constellation of purple dots overlaid on a regular map, indicating where the temperature crosses a certain threshold. “Here’s a hot thing, here’s a hot thing,” says Leidich, pointing to the dots.
When he heard about Urban Sky, he was intrigued—though not by Hotspot, yet. The microballoons can also carry stratosphere-capable cameras that can focus through the thin air up there and take natural-color images—just regular pictures—with pixels the size of an index card. The shots cover a lot of ground at a relatively sharp resolution and for a relatively low cost. It was, says Brady, “very, very, very competitive.
Denver Water typically does an annual survey of the area to understand what it needs to fix where. After 2021’s Platte River Fire, it first used a drone for part of that work. But because Urban Sky’s microballoons were more affordable, Denver Water could manage more launches to catch changes over a shorter time and determine how well mitigations like erosion barriers were working. The flyers also offered more imagery from a single launch.
In a year or so, the building that houses Urban Sky is slated to be torn down. The company hopes that by then it will have raised its profile enough to afford a new space. If organizations like Denver Water and the USGS want to take advantage of little high flyers, that might come to pass. But Urban Sky won’t be alone in trying for customers. Its small systems float with those of other companies, like Near Space Labs and Raven Aerostar.
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