A rare event — an invasive-species patch, a pollution plume, a fire ignition — starts at a random point on the map and grows outward. A ground station only notices it once its spreading edge physically crosses into that station's fixed sensing radius, drawn as the translucent green ring. Between stations sits a blind spot: an event that starts there has to grow large before any ring reaches it, so detection is late and the logged spread radius is big. Tighten the spacing and the rings overlap into full coverage, so almost anywhere the event starts, a ring is already close — detection is fast and the spread radius at that moment is small.
The satellite overlay adds a second, independent detection path: it sees the whole map with no blind spots, but only resolves events above a minimum size and reports on a fixed revisit cadence, so it trades ground-network gaps for coarser resolution and built-in latency. Toggle it on to see it win the race when ground stations are sparse, and lose it when ground stations are already dense.
- Station spacing — grid pitch between ground stations; wider spacing means fewer stations and bigger blind spots between their sensing rings.
- New event — spawns a fresh event at a random location and starts timing a new trial under the current settings.
- Auto-trials — automatically spawns a new event as soon as the previous one is detected, so the history and averages fill up quickly.
Real-world relevance: this is exactly the design tension behind ecological monitoring networks — every extra station or satellite pass costs money, but leaving gaps means real events can grow unnoticed for far longer before anyone reacts.