 Never crossed my mind that when I started my engineering career, I would end up being part of a satellite mission, let alone driving the requirements and trying to understand the user requirements for a cause that can save lives, that can save livelihoods and that can improve the lives of Australians. It's essentially a dream come true. Here we have a drought experiment where we are subjecting three species of eucalypts to either a simulated drought or to a control treatment. We want to see how light is reflected from the leaves to the instrument or to a satellite. Eucalypts are known for being more flammable than other species and we are trying to understand how these flammability characteristics can be captured using satellite images. Ausfield's a small satellite system designed to take images of the Earth's surface in the near-infrared wavelength region and we can use that not to detect fires directly but to make measurements of the available fuel load and the moisture content, how wet it is so we can make predictions about where fires are likely to start and when they do start where they are likely to run and how best to protect against them. We plan to launch a satellite to look at the conditions of the landscape that are prone to bushfires. In terms of developing science products one essential component is to collect information of the ground so we need to collect information about the fuel condition and all the variables that influence the inherent flammability of the landscape. So in this box we have two imaging spectrometers. These two cameras capture the incoming light from the sun or from the reflected surface, in this case the eucalypts but eventually we want a version of this to launch into space. We're trying to simulate what a satellite might see so a satellite might be four or five hundred kilometres up there. We're getting very good resolution, we're down sort of leaf level so we can actually look at pixels within each leaf to get the spectra. So the work that we are doing collecting data on the ground is very unique and is essential for the calibration of satellites not only for monitoring bushfire conditions but also other information, other applications. Right, three, four, five. It's very easy to tell the difference between a healthy and an unhealthy leaf and so if we can measure that and detect that with the Osfield satellite then we'll be in a very good position that gives us a little bit more information about the state of the trees. We're learning a lot about the eucalypts and how they reflect the stress of being water deprived and this is something that very few people have seen let alone have experimented with. What we are doing is a great contribution not only for Australia but also worldwide because we intend to make this data publicly available in datasets. It's an interesting challenge working with something like Osfield the demands for their pictures are somewhat different than what we're used to for astronomy and so it's exciting trying to solve the same sort of problem in a different environment for a different application. On the one hand yes this requires lots of time hundreds of hours in the lab, lots of late nights but it's also about knowing that we can eventually save lives and that we're doing something that very few people can do and that is designing a satellite from scratch and seeing it put in orbit.