California got its second satellite tuned to spot a powerful climate pollutant Thursday when it launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Lompoc. Pasadena-based nonprofit Carbon Mapper, which partners with the state, can now check twice as often for climate-heating methane plumes, improving the emerging picture of this invisible gas.
“This means we can make observations at more locations and more frequently at existing locations,” Lindsay Buckley, spokesperson for the California Air Resources Board, said in a statement. Unlike other pollutants, methane is not exhaust. Instead, it leaks, gushes or wafts from landfills, oil and gas equipment and manure pits at dairy operations.
Regulators will be able to to find leaks and follow up faster to make sure operators have made repairs, Buckley added. Many other states and countries have been making use of the images Carbon Mapper’s first satellite, Tanager-1, beams down.
Methane traps heat at about 80 times the rate of carbon dioxide for the decade-plus that it lasts in the air. That makes it urgent to address.
In California, which is required to reduce methane emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, landfills are responsible for about 41% of methane pollution.
Carbon Mapper launched its first methane-tracking satellite, Tanager-1, in August 2024, in partnership with the satellite company Planet Labs and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Both went aboard SpaceX rockets.
Carbon Mapper chief executive Riley Duren, who worked at NASA for 30 years, said the company aims to visualize 90% of methane emissions around the planet eventually. Satellite sensors like the one on the new Tanager-2 can detect the invisible gas by measuring wavelengths of light bouncing off the earth’s surface. Global methane plume data is available on 30-day lag on Carbon Mapper’s website.
“If you can make the data accessible, and you can work with people in a way that teaches them to use the data, then you can achieve large reductions in emissions,” Duren said.
The air board started working with Carbon Mapper last spring to pinpoint methane emissions. The satellite can see methane at the facility level — exact to within 50 meters. The agency gets the images within 48 hours, then sends out notices to landfill and oil and gas operators when methane is seen escaping.
CARB says that since it started getting the data in May 2025 from the first methane satellite, it’s been able to address at least 18 methane gushers. Buckley noted a 918-kg-per-hour leak at the Midway-Sunset Oil and Gas field in Kern County in August that was fixed the same day California Resources Corporation was notified.
Livestock operations don’t get cited. Emissions aren’t directly regulated yet for the sector, which contributes about 26% of the state’s methane pollution.
Sometimes releases are allowed, despite the climate impact of methane, for example when a pressure relief valve is vented on a gas tank as part of maintenance. Sometimes the operators already know about the leaks and are fixing them when the state air agency contacts them, according to the state’s dashboard.
But sometimes the companies didn’t know about the leak and make a repair. The 18 large leaks Buckley mentioned fixing account for more than 142,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide prevented from entering the atmosphere, she said. That’s the equivalent of taking about 32,000 gas-powered cars off the road for a year.
Carbon Mapper’s goal is to prevent the equivalent of a billion tons of carbon dioxide every year with a constellation of satellites. It expects to launch two more next year. In addition to California, the company partners with 11 other states to report methane super emitters, but Duren said California is the only state with a program that sends out notices to enforce its regulations.
He said in total there have been 66 fixes at oil and gas sites across the U.S. in the past year, and another 60 leaks under investigation. Carbon Mapper doesn’t have similar numbers for landfills because methods to calculate the impacts of repairs are still being developed.
The Tanager-2 took off around 11:30 a.m. on a foggy day. It’s a replica of the Tanager-1, but is on a different orbit. The latter crosses the equator roughly at noon each day and the new one will cross around 10:30 a.m.
Currently, with one satellite, California gets to make methane observations about three times a week, Duren said.
“Once we build the constellation out, the four-plus satellites, we’ll be able to make multiple observations a day of the same area,” he said.
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