Shortly after 2 p.m. Pacific Time on Monday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California carrying several satellites into orbit.
These launches have become almost routine—SpaceX said it was the fifth successful launch and landing for that Falcon rocket—but one of the satellites aboard is anything but ordinary.
About the size of a home washing machine, the satellite called MethaneSAT will help protect the atmosphere it now orbits just above.
MethaneSAT is the product of an environmental group, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), which raised $88 million for its design, construction and launch, making it the first satellite put into space by a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization.
Courtesy EDF
Why would an environmental group go to such lengths to put a satellite into space?
“Measuring methane emissions really matters,” EDF Senior Vice President for Energy Transition Mark Brownstein explained at a press briefing before the launch.
MethaneSAT carries sophisticated detection equipment to measure methane escaping into the atmosphere, especially from oil and gas operations around the world.
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. Although methane does not persist in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide, the main source of climate change, methane can do more harm to the climate in the short term, according to EDF Chief Scientist Steven Hamburg.
“Methane emissions were getting insufficient attention,” Hamburg told Newsweek. “Yet they are the key determinant of near-term warming.”
Climate policy experts often describe relatively easy climate fixes as “low-hanging fruit,” and Hamburg said methane emissions, which often come from leaks and shoddy industrial practices, are among the easiest fixes.
“I like to call it fruit lying on the ground,” Hamburg said. But first you have to find the fruit, and finding methane emissions has been difficult.
Methane seeps from agricultural sites and landfills as a result of organic decay, and from coal mines that liberate the gas trapped underground. But the world’s oil and gas drillers are the main source of concern because they emit huge amounts of methane and have the means to contain it.
“It’s a reasonably profitable industry,” Brownstein said with a note of sarcastic understatement.
Much of what the petroleum industry reports to governments about methane leaks is not directly measured, Brownstein said, but rather calculated from engineering estimates.
When researchers are able to use detection equipment at drilling and processing sites, they often find the emissions estimates are absurdly low.
With MethaneSAT on the prowl from above, methane emissions and those who allow them will have no place to hide.
Detecting Methane From Space
Methane is an invisible, even odorless gas. (The smell we associate with natural gas is a chemical that’s added to gas lines in order to detect leaks.) So, finding and measuring methane in the atmosphere requires spectrometers that can identify the “signature” of the chemical by the frequency of light that it absorbs.
Spectrometers on ground-based and aerial equipment help find methane leaks but not at the scale required to address a global problem.
“This created a snapshot of what’s happening,” Hamburg explained. “We needed the motion picture version of it.”
Hamburg worked with scientists at Harvard University to come up with the specifications for a space-based monitoring system to get both highly detailed resolution and wide monitoring capability. Then it was up to the engineers at Ball Aerospace to build the equipment and the satellite to carry it.
Courtesy BAE
“I can tell you this is the most sophisticated sensor for methane that’s ever been built,” Alberto Conti told Newsweek. Conti is vice president and general manager for civil space at BAE Space and Mission Systems. (Ball Aerospace was recently acquired by BAE.)
To work as EDF intended, the spectrometer had to detect methane at just a few parts per billion in the air and do so over wide swaths of land. “Which is hard to do, because you’re flying around the Earth every 90 minutes,” Conti said.
Fortunately, Ball had considerable experience building high-end observation equipment. You’ve heard of the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes? Those pioneering projects included Ball’s work.
If the company name “Ball” sounds familiar, it’s probably because of the company’s earlier products, glass jars. Ball grew into one of the world’s largest producers of food containers before one of the founder’s sons took an interest in rockets as a student in the 1950s, Conti said, giving rise to the company’s aerospace division.
“We call it ‘from jars to stars,'” Conti said.
Ball is on the Newsweek ranking of America’s Most Responsible Companies, and Conti said MethaneSAT follows in a tradition of environmental monitoring missions that has included air quality work and measurements that contributed to a better understanding of the hole in the Earth’s ozone layer.
“There’s a long history of supporting sustainability across the board,” Conti said.
Closing the Methane Loop
EDF has partnered with Google to make the MethaneSAT data accessible for scientists, citizen groups, regulators and businesses that want to put it to use.
“The more data we find, the better,” Antoine Rostand, president and co-founder of climate technology company Kayrros, told Newsweek.
Kayrros has been mapping methane sources based on data available from two satellites already in orbit. Those have cruder detection capabilities than what MethaneSAT will offer. But even with that limited view, Kayrross was able to produce a map revealing more than 5,600 methane super-emitters from oil and gas fields, coal mines and waste and agricultural sites.
Until recently, however, there were few policy tools to turn that information into action.
“That was the big missing part,” Rostand said. “There was no real feedback mechanism.”
That has started to change, he said, with an international inventory of emissions created by the United Nations and nascent regulatory action in Europe and the U.S.
The European Union is setting rules for transparency about the methane emissions associated with the production of the natural gas it purchases. In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing regulations that will require methane reductions from gas production and assess fees on excess emissions.
Additionally, some of the world’s major oil and gas producers agreed to voluntary methane reductions at the U.N. COP28 climate talks in December.
“We are very optimistic about finally moving from talking about methane to actually doing something about it,” Rostand said.
EDF’s Brownstein said MethaneSAT data can help inform all of those processes.
“This is a tool for accountability,” Brownstein said. “But I also like to think of it as a tool that can help document progress that leading companies are making.”
Ideally, he said, transparency will create a “race to the top,” allowing oil and gas producers who are limiting emissions to have proof while providing evidence to call out the laggards. Investors and major gas consumers could also act based on the sound data.
The combination of sophisticated monitoring, open data and regulatory and market controls promises to finally rein in this greenhouse gas, and a satellite spinning above us could help keep our climate system from spinning dangerously out of balance.