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The international scientific community has called for more detailed data on vegetation fires to improve the understanding of their role in global atmospheric chemistry, and on fire itself as an ecosystem disturbance. The fire science community highlighted the value of information such as fire spatial distribution, timing, extent, energy release, burning efficiency and emissions. In order to obtain reliable information on these parameters, a combination of operational and experimental space-borne sensors with in situ and airborne sensor measurements is required. A small satellite demonstrator mission on Bi-spectral InfraRed Detection (BIRD) was prepared by the Institute of Space Sensor Technology and Planetary Exploration of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). It was successfully launched on 22 October 2001 into a 570 km sun-synchronous orbit. This paper presents new thermal mapping results obtained with the Advanced BIRD Airborne Simulator (ABAS) during a flight campaign over controlled forest fires in the open coal mining region of the Brandenburg country in Germany on 23 August 2001. These data have been successfully used to retrieve the effective area and effective temperature of forest fires by means of the application of the bi-spectral sub-pixel method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]