Let me begin to infect you with this excitement and sense of wonder by examining the satellite image below.

The first image you encountered was the background to the Dedication and the target was the entire continent of Australia nestled in its place within the global pattern of things. The next images were of the greenness of the land surface of the entire globe spread flat as though we had skinned our planet Earth. We will return to these global images later. The third image is at the head of this chapter. It was deliberately chosen to be strange and mysterious even though the details of the landscape are discernible.

This fourth image does not offer quite such a synoptic view as the previous two, but it is spectacular nonetheless, and instantly recognisable. It is an image of a Dry Season wildfire in Arnhem Land, NT, as recorded by an imaging system called the Multi-Spectral Scanner (MSS) onboard spacecraft number 5 of the Landsat satellite series at 0930 hours AEST on September 2, 1986.This looks just like a fire viewed from an aircraft. Remember, this image was recorded 900 km above the surface of Australia. As an exercise, the size of this image will be determined by the reader a little further on in this chapter.

If you examine the image closely, you can discern a great deal of detail about the fire: the actively burning fire front, the many smoke plumes, and the colours and shapes of the unburned landscape as well as the fire footprint (scar) left behind as the fire advances.

I still find it an amazing realisation that this scene was recorded by an imaging device onboard the Landsat spacecraft, which is the size of a Volkswagen sedan car, orbiting the Earth some 900 kilometres above that fire.