Last year, a nonprofit environmental group launched a new satellite to measure methane emissions from oil and gas sites worldwide, in a bid to expand our understanding of global warming and what’s driving it.
The data from the satellite would give governments and the public fresh insight into where this planet-heating gas was coming from and who was responsible for it.
For nearly two weeks, however, the mission’s controllers have been unable to get in contact with the satellite. It has lost power, they said, and most likely cannot be recovered. The cause is being investigated.
In its short time in orbit, the satellite, named MethaneSAT, collected “magnificent” data, said Steven Hamburg, chief scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, the nonprofit that led the project. He and other researchers will continue processing the measurements it beamed back before its untimely demise.
MethaneSAT had an expected life of five years. It ended up collecting a little under a year’s worth of data in all, Dr. Hamburg said.
The project’s key accomplishment, he said, was showing that a satellite could pinpoint emissions at a global scale. Until recently, identifying major emitters was largely done with airplanes, drones or equipment on the ground.
“We set out in this first year to demonstrate what was possible, that we could think about direct measurement of greenhouse gases in a way that we had never been able to do before,” Dr. Hamburg said. “And I think we demonstrated that.”
Methane, the main component of natural gas, is burned worldwide in power plants and factories, as well as in gas stoves in homes. But the gas is leaky: Large amounts of it escape unburned from pipelines and drill sites. Methane is also released into the air from wetlands, landfills and feedlots for livestock.
In the atmosphere, all this gas absorbs and re-emits heat from Earth’s surface with high efficiency. This causes heat to remain trapped near the Earth, raising global temperatures. All told, methane is the second-biggest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide.
NASA and other government agencies monitor methane concentrations from space, as do private companies. Still, MethaneSAT filled a gap. Circling the planet 15 times a day, from 360 miles above, it tracked methane over large areas but with enough precision to identify specific facilities and oil wells.
The $88 million project was supported by the New Zealand Space Agency and other partners. It was financed by donors including the Bezos Earth Fund, the climate- and nature-focused charity started by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.
By June, the MethaneSAT team had worked out how to process the data from the satellite quickly and automatically, and had begun releasing batches of images every two weeks. Their early measurements suggested that emissions from oil- and gas-producing basins in North America and Central Asia were much higher than previously estimated.
But on June 20, the team lost contact.
The satellite had been swinging over the Pacific Ocean when communications stopped, Dr. Hamburg said. Engineers tried various things to re-establish a connection but didn’t succeed.
Compared with MethaneSAT, spacecraft for larger missions are typically built with more redundancy to protect against failure, Dr. Hamburg said. “But that obviously adds a lot of cost,” he said.
It’s too early to say whether the Environmental Defense Fund will build a replacement satellite, Dr. Hamburg said. Even so, the organization remains committed to providing information that will help governments and companies curb methane emissions, he said.
Raymond Zhong reports on climate and environmental issues for The Times.
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