NASA's Heat-detecting Satellites Capture Images of Fires Around the World

Monday NASA released a series of images of fires burning around the world taken by orbiting satellites, revealing raging agricultural fires in Africa, a blaze at a California power station and two wildfires in New Mexico.

The images, taken by the Aqua and Terra satellites, are a testament to the heat-detecting capabilities of satellites orbiting miles overhead.

In Africa, fields being cleared by the "slash and burn" method of farming painted a satellite map of the continent's center red with countless tiny dots depicting the location of fires.

Slash and burn has been used by humans as a means of returning nutrients to the soil and and clearing the ground of unwanted plants for 12,000 years. NASA reports that 7 percent of the world's farmers still use the slash and burn method. The images were captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite.

In central Africa, the agricultural burning season runs from May to August. These 2005 images trace the fires raging across the continent.

Terra's MODIS system also captured a natural-color satellite image of California's Powerhouse Fire, which at the moment is only 20 percent contained and has the potential to grow because of high humidity in the area of Southern California where it burns.

According to CBSnews.com, "Nearly 3,000 people from some 700 homes were under evacuation orders Monday as a wildfire north of Los Angeles kept growing, feeding on old, dry brush, some of which hadn't burned in decades. The blaze had burned about 46 square miles in the mountains and canyons of the Angeles National Forest, destroying at least six homes and damaging 15 more."

Over New Mexico, the NASA satellites captured images of the Tres Lagunas and Thompson Ridge fires. The Tres Lagunas fire started about 10 miles north of Pecos, N.M., and as of June 2, the fire had burned 7,476 acres. The fire is currently uncontained. The Thompson Ridge fire, in the Valles Caldera National Preserve, located about two miles northeast of La Cueva, N.M., is reported to be human-caused. So far, 1,906 acres have burned in the Preserve.

Images of both fires were captured by the MODIS system on NASA's Aqua satellite.