MethaneSAT for methane emission detection

A new satellite called MethaneSAT is set to be launched at the end of this year and will be able to detect and measure methane emissions and leaks worldwide from spring 2024 with unprecedented precision.

What is special: there is no government contract and no commercial company behind its development. Rather, the $90 million satellite was created as a major collaborative project by the environmental non-profit organization Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) with scientists, environmental activists and the private space industry, funded by philanthropists and its three million members and activists around the world. The New Zealand government also supports the project.

If MethaneSAT delivers precise methane measurements in the coming year, that would not only be a profound scientific contribution. Because an environmental organization is behind it, unlike state organizations, it can also publicly name those responsible for methane emissions.

Although there are already a number of satellites orbiting the earth that also measure methane concentrations, their systems can only collect data either globally or only from known locations.

The former fail to detect emissions from the countless small wells and leaks that are blamed for much of the total emissions. These include the TROPOMI measuring instrument on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Copernicus Sentinel 5 precursor satellite.

The latter only cover limited areas, for example around oil and gas production areas or large industrial plants. Companies use and pay for their service to document their methane emissions. This includes the satellite of the Canadian company GHGSat.

The idea for MethaneSAT was first pitched by Fred Krupp, President of the Environmental Defense Fund, in a TED talk in April 2018, which he used to promote seed funding at the time.

The driving forces behind the project are atmospheric and environmental scientist Steven Wofsy of Harvard University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and EDF chief scientist Steven Hamburg, once an environmental scientist at the University of Kansas and IPCC lead author.

The two explained that their engagement came partly from frustration at the US government’s years of inaction on climate change, but also from a growing realization that curbing methane emissions can have significant short-term impacts on climate change. They believe that rapidly lowering methane concentrations can slow global warming in the short term while the world switches to low-carbon energy sources as a long-term solution.

At the heart of MethaneSAT are two extremely sensitive spectrometers that measure in two narrow areas of the short-wave infrared spectrum where methane and oxygen absorb light. The geographic resolution is about one square kilometer. Around the world, the satellite will continuously record both large releases, for example over oil and gas fields, and small emissions, for example from pipeline leaks. It can also detect and quantify intermittent sources, such as from agriculture. Artificial intelligence, which learns data from aircraft measurements and from other satellites, processes the raw data within a few days so that they can be published quickly as concentration maps.

The satellite will be built and tested by Ball Aerospace in Boulder, California, and Blue Canyon Technologies in Lafayette, Colorado. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch them into orbit. The control center is being built by Rocket Labs in Auckland, New Zealand.