A ... Emissions Satellite Just Went Dark

Source: Found here

An $88 million satellite backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos is lost in space. MethaneSAT, designed to sniff out sources of methane emissions across the globe, only survived about 15 months in Earth's orbit before meeting its untimely end.

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), which launched the satellite in March 2024, announced its demise on July 1. The organization revealed that MethaneSAT suddenly went silent on June 20, and its mission operations team has been unable to re-establish contact ever since. Now, they believe the satellite has lost power altogether.

Steven Hamburg, EDF's chief scientist and leader of the MethaneSAT mission, told Science there was no previous indication of a problem. "Not one of my better days or weeks," he said.

When MethaneSAT launched, EDF promised it would be a ⁘game-changer⁘ for tracking planet-warming methane emissions, helping regulators address point sources of this potent greenhouse gas.

In some ways, it has been. For over a year, this satellite helped pinpoint industrial sources of methane emissions—primarily those produced by the oil and gas industry. This greenhouse gas is incredibly potent, trapping 28 times more heat in Earth's atmosphere over a 100-year time period than carbon dioxide, according to the Environmental Protection Agency .

Experts know methane emissions primarily stem from agriculture, fossil fuel production, and decomposition of landfill waste, but its point sources are difficult to locate and quantify individually.

MethaneSAT, developed with the help of a $100 million grant from Jeff Bezos's Earth Fund, aimed to make this easier. While other satellites—such as the European Space Agency's Sentinel-5—can map methane on larger scales, MethaneSAT's state-of-the-art spectrometers could detect smaller emissions across entire oil and gas fields.

At the same time, it zeroed in on hot spots with unprecedented precision, producing high-resolution snapshots of methane "leaks."

"Thanks to MethaneSAT, we have gained critical insight about the distribution and volume of methane being released from oil and gas production areas," the EDF statement reads. "We have also developed an unprecedented capability to interpret the measurements from space and translate them into volumes of methane released.

This capacity will be valuable to other missions."