NASA says it wants to build a vast new constellation of satellites to monitor and protect the Earth, and it’s turning to an unlikely source of funding – through Kickstarter – in order to do so. But before you start panicking, realize that NASA isn’t turning to crowdfunding to ward of the threat of alien invasion. Instead, NASA wants to protect us from one of the biggest threats on the ground – wildfires.

The proposed system is known as FireSat, and is being built in collaboration with a San Francisco-based startup called Quadra Pi R2E. The system, if it’s ever built, will rely on a constellation of around 200 satellites equipped with infrared sensors that can identify wildfires as soon as they grow to a size of 50 x 35 feet wide, NASA said in a press statement. Although that’s a pretty large area (you can guarantee the fire will be raging by that time) it still pales into comparison to the kind of wildfires that commonly hit the headlines.

The crucial thing about NASA’s FireSat system is it can detect wildfires within 15 minutes of them starting, and just three minutes after detection it can notify emergency services in the area so they can rush out to tackle it. When one considers that some wilfires burn and grow in size for days before they’re spotted, that’s a big improvement.

“Delays in detection can lead to rapid escalation of a fire, and dramatic growth of the cost of suppression,” said Robert Staehle, lead designer of FireSat at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is leading the project. “The system we envision will work day and night for fires anywhere in the world.”

The Kickstarter page says FireSat would “dramatically improve support for time-critical environmental response decisions (e.g., wildfires, oil spills, eruptions, illegal flaring, etc.) and will provide significant protection to individuals, ecosystems, and livelihoods on a global scale”. The total estimated cost for the project stands at $30 million, with the goal of getting the satellites in orbit by 2018 at the latest. The Kickstarter campaign, which is seeking a more modest $280,000, has been developed “to present the FireSat opportunity to the general public to determine whether enough grass-roots interest exists to advance the project.”

Satellites have been used to track wildfires before, but the new system is the first time anyone has used them to prevent fires. The system is still just a concept for now, but as NASA points out, it could make a huge difference if firefighters are made aware of a blaze as soon as it begins. The infamous 2014 King Fire in California for example, spread across 10 miles of land in just one afternoon, and ultimately devastated close to 100,000 acres of land.

Image credit: Quadra Pi R2E