Orbital Thermal Hotspot Detector

This simulator models the exact instrument problem behind planetary volcano observatories: an orbiting thermal-infrared sensor never sees a lava flow's true temperature — only a radiance average blurred across each pixel's footprint. A continuous "true" heat field (an active vent or flow with adjustable temperature and radius, set against a planetary background from icy-moon to Venusian) sits beneath a coarser sensor grid whose pixel size scales with orbital altitude exactly as GSD = altitude × IFOV. Each sensor pixel integrates real Stefan–Boltzmann radiance from its sub-pixel mix of hot and cold surface, then reports an apparent brightness temperature that is always biased low relative to the true vent — the same "mixed pixel" effect that limits real missions like MODIS/MODVOLC and Galileo's NIMS at Io. Live readouts track that retrieval bias alongside a physically grounded radiant-heat-flux and effusion-rate estimate, the same style of thermal proxy volcanologists use to infer how much lava a planet is actually erupting from orbit alone.