Satellites spy raging bushfires in Australia | Space photo of the day for Jan. 15, 2026

A brown landscape is scarred dark red as streaks of orange flames are seen around the edges of the dark area with streams of smoke moving toward the bottom of the image.

While wildfires happen at different times across the globe, they do all have one thing in common: they can be absolutely devastating.

One of the clearest ways to grasp the full impact these events have is to see them from space, and that's exactly what Europe's Copernicus program is built to do: deliver detailed and frequently updated images of Earth's land and coasts that can be used to influence policies. To do this, the program uses Sentinel satellites, which zip around Earth, capturing various breathtaking, and heartbreaking, views from low Earth orbit.