The Conversation
August 14, 2024
Asteroids (Festa/SHutterstock.com)
Launched in 2011, NASA’s NEOWISE mission operated in Earth’s orbit until late last week. It detected more than 3,000 near-Earth objects or NEOs – asteroids or comets whose orbits can bring them close to Earth, even with the possibility of a collision. NEOWISE was shut down on August 8.
Surveying the population of NEOs is central to the emerging concept of planetary defence. That is, understanding and mitigating the risk of collision from asteroids large enough to do significant damage to Earth.
NEOWISE has made fundamental contributions to establishing the knowledge base for planetary defence, with more than 200 of the 3,000 objects it studied not known to us previously.
Now at mission end, and commanded by NASA to shut itself down, NEOWISE will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere before the end of this year. Where does that leave us with defending our planet?
All Known Asteroids in the Solar System (1999–2018)
From astrophysics to planetary defence
NEOWISE started life as a different mission, simply called WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer). It was designed to study the infrared radiation from distant galaxies in the universe.
Infrared means “beyond red” – infrared light sits just past the red end of the spectrum of colours humans can see. We know infrared radiation better as the heat from the Sun, for example, or from a radiator keeping us warm in winter.
Infrared light is just outside the part of the spectrum that the human eye can see.
brgfx/Shutterstock
When the coolant on the WISE mission ran out and these sensitive observations of galaxies couldn’t be carried out any more, NASA granted a mission extension under the NEOWISE name. They realised the telescope system was still sensitive enough to detect asteroids and comets that come close to Earth and the Sun, thereby having a very strong infrared signal.
NASA has an extraordinary history of squeezing extra life out of missions that reach completion. In this case, NEOWISE represented an entire second life, in an entirely different area of research.
How will we defend Earth now?
As well as the discovery and study of thousands of NEOs, NEOWISE established the foundation of knowledge that has informed a new, dedicated planetary defence mission. NASA’s NEO Surveyor will be launched in 2027.
NEO Surveyor’s goal is to discover approximately two thirds of all NEOs larger than 140 metres in diameter, over a five year baseline survey. This is a big step toward fulfilling the mandate United States Congress has provided to NASA: to discover 90% of all NEOs in this size range.
If they hit Earth, asteroids of this size could cause mass casualties if the impact were over a large metropolitan region.
You might think this poses a bit of a risk – shutting down NEOWISE three years before launching NEO Surveyor. What happens if one of these big asteroids comes our way in the next few years?
The risks are very small, as estimates show asteroids 140 metres in diameter impact Earth only approximately every 20,000 years. So, we would have to be extremely unlucky to have one in any given three-year period, especially impacting a place that would cause a large amount of damage. Only around 3% of Earth’s surface is occupied by urban areas.
NASA doesn’t really have much of a choice with the end of NEOWISE. The Sun’s 11-year activity cycle is picking up and causing Earth’s upper atmosphere, the ionosphere, to thicken. NEOWISE is flying through this ionosphere and can’t raise its orbit, so the ionosphere is inevitably dragging NEOWISE back to Earth.
NEO Surveyor started construction in 2023, so a 2027 launch is pretty impressively rapid, which is minimising the gap between NEOWISE and NEO Surveyor.
NEOWISE is scheduled to enter Earth’s atmosphere before the end of the year, but we don’t know precisely when.
Weighing almost 700kg, some of NEOWISE itself is likely to impact the surface of Earth. Hopefully it stays away from populated areas in the process – some recent re-entry events have resulted in space debris falling reasonably close to populated areas.
An asteroid is coming! What next?
Knowing about an asteroid on a collision course with Earth is one thing. Doing something about it is another thing altogether.
Huge steps toward planetary defence occurred two years ago, when the DART mission flew to an asteroid, impacted it, and changed its trajectory. This demonstrated it’s possible to change the course of asteroids, which could be used in the future to protect Earth from a collision.
Predicting potential Earth impacts as far as possible in advance, years preferably, gives the DART-style technology approach a chance.
The pioneering work of NEOWISE, and the upcoming comprehensive observations of NEO Surveyor, will place an enormous amount of information in our scientific bank, which will never go out of date and will be the basis for planetary defence for perhaps hundreds of years into the future.
Steven Tingay, John Curtin Distinguished Professor (Radio Astronomy), Curtin University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Measuring Martian winds with sound
Novel anemometer tracks sound travel for speedier, more precise wind speed calculations on the red planet
American Institute of Physics
image:
Authors Robert White (left), Ian Neeson (center) and Don Banfield (right) in the Mars Simulation Wind Tunnel at the University of Aarhus, Denmark in 2019, preparing to test early prototypes of the Mars sonic anemometer, visible in the center. The two prototypes were fabricated by Tufts University (left) and VN Instruments (right).
view moreCredit: White, Neeson, and Banfield
WASHINGTON, Aug. 13, 2024 – Mars has a notoriously inhospitable environment, with temperatures that fluctuate dramatically over the course of a Martian day and average minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Its surface is mostly covered in red dust, with terrain typified by craters, canyons, and volcanoes. And its atmosphere is extremely thin, comprising only about 1% of the density of Earth’s.
Needless to say, measuring wind speeds on the red planet is challenging. Martian landers have been able capture measurements — some gauging the cooling rate of heated materials when winds blow over them, others using cameras to image “tell-tales” that blow in the wind. Both anemometric methods have yielded valuable insight into the planet’s climate and atmosphere.
But there’s still room for improvement in the astronomical toolshed, especially as plans to send astronauts to Mars unfold in the coming years.
In JASA, published on behalf of the Acoustical Society of America by AIP Publishing, researchers from Canada and the U.S. demonstrated a novel sonic anemometric system featuring a pair of narrowband piezoelectric transducers to measure the travel time of sound pulses through Martian air. The study accounted for variables including transducer diffraction effects and wind direction.
“By measuring sound travel time differences both forward and backward, we can accurately measure wind in three dimensions,” said author Robert White. “The two major advantages of this method are that it’s fast and it works well at low speeds.”
The researchers hope to be able to measure up to 100 wind speeds per second and at speeds as low as 1 cm/s, a remarkable contrast to previous methods that could register only about 1 wind speed per second and struggled to track speeds below 50 cm/s.
“By measuring quickly and accurately, we hope to be able to measure not only mean winds, but also turbulence and fluctuating winds,” said White. “This is important for understanding atmospheric variables that could be problematic for small vehicles such as the Ingenuity helicopter that flew on Mars recently.”
The researchers characterized ultrasonic transducers and sensors over a wide range of temperatures and a narrow range of pressures in carbon dioxide, the primary atmospheric gas on Mars. With their selections, they showed only nominal error rates would result from temperature and pressure changes.
“The system we’re developing will be 10 times faster and 10 times more accurate than anything previously used,” said White. “We hope it will produce more valuable data as future missions to Mars are considered and provide useful information on the Martian climate, perhaps also with implications for better understanding the climate of our own planet.”
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The article “Modeling and characterization of gas coupled ultrasonic transducers at low pressures and temperatures and implications for sonic anemometry on Mars” is authored by Robert D. White, Rishabh Chaudhary, Zijia Zhao, Luisa Chiesa, Ian Neeson, and Don Banfield. The article will appear in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) on Aug. 13, 2024 (DOI: 10.1121/10.0028008). After that date, it can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0028008.
ABOUT THE JOURNAL
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) is published on behalf of the Acoustical Society of America. Since 1929, the journal has been the leading source of theoretical and experimental research results in the broad interdisciplinary subject of sound. JASA serves physical scientists, life scientists, engineers, psychologists, physiologists, architects, musicians, and speech communication specialists. See https://asa.scitation.org/journal/jas
ABOUT ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7,000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics. ASA publications include The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (the world's leading journal on acoustics), JASA Express Letters, Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, Acoustics Today magazine, books, and standards on acoustics. The society also holds two major scientific meetings each year. See https://acousticalsociety.org/
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Journal
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Article Title
Modeling and characterization of gas coupled ultrasonic transducers at low pressures and temperatures and implications for sonic anemometry on Mars
Article Publication Date
13-Aug-2024
NASA scientists hope to use Cold Atom Lab to better understand dark energy
A new study released on Tuesday examines the use of NASA's Cold Atom Lab (pictured) on the International Space Station. File Photo courtesy of NASA
Aug. 13 (UPI) -- For the first time, ultra-cold atoms have been used to detect changes in the surrounding environment in space, taking a step of revolutionizing how quantum science can be used.
A new study released Tuesday in the science journal Nature Communications, NASA's Cold Atom Lab on the International Space Station measured subtle vibrations of the orbiting lab.
The team using the Cold Atom Lab made their measurements with an interferometer, a quantum tool that can accurately measure gravity, magnetic fields and other forces. Earth-bound scientists use the tool to study gravity and technologies to help aircraft and ship navigation.
Physicists hope using such technology in space will allow for longer measurement times and improve instrument sensitivity.
"Reaching this milestone was incredibly challenging, and our success was not always a given," Jason Williams, the Cold Atom Lab project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. "It took dedication and a sense of adventure by the team to make this happen."
Researchers said such precise measurements of gravity could benefit the understanding of dark matter and dark energy, which remains a mystery to modern science. Dark matter, which is an invisible substance, is five times more common than the matter used to make up the planets and stars.
"Atom interferometry could also be used to test Einstein's theory of general relativity in new ways," University of Virginia professor Cass Sackett, a Cold Atom Lab principal investigator and co-author of the study.
"This is the basic theory explaining the large-scale structure of our universe, and we know that there are aspects of the theory that we don't understand correctly. This technology may help us fill in those gaps and give us a more complete picture of the reality we inhabit."
SwRI-led team finds evidence of hydration on Psyche
Webb telescope data indicate a complex history for the metallic asteroid
Southwest Research Institute
image:
An SwRI-led team used NASA’s Webb telescope, shown in the bottom right corner of this illustration, to confirm the presence of hydrated minerals on the surface of Psyche, a massive and heavily metallic body in the main asteroid belt. These findings suggest a complex history for this interesting asteroid, which many scientists think could be the remnant core of a protoplanet, including impacts with hydrated asteroids.
view moreCredit: Southwest Research Institute
SAN ANTONIO — August 13, 2024 —Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a Southwest Research Institute-led team has confirmed hydroxyl molecules on the surface of the metallic asteroid Psyche. The presence of hydrated minerals suggests a complex history for Psyche, important context for the NASA spacecraft en route to this interesting asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter.
At about 140 miles in diameter, Psyche is one of the most massive objects in the main asteroid belt. Previous observations indicate that Psyche is a dense, largely metallic object that could be a leftover core from a planet that experienced a catastrophic collision. On Oct. 13, 2023, NASA launched the Psyche spacecraft, which is traveling 2.2 billion miles to arrive at the asteroid in August 2029.
“Using telescopes at different wavelengths of infrared light, the SwRI-led research will provide different but complementary information to what the Psyche spacecraft is designed to study,” said SwRI’s Dr. Tracy Becker, second author of a new American Astronomical Society’s Planetary Science Journal paper discussing these findings.
“Our understanding of solar system evolution is closely tied to interpretations of asteroid composition, particularly the M-class asteroids that contain higher concentrations of metal,” said Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian’s Dr. Stephanie Jarmak, the paper’s lead author, who conducted much of this research while at SwRI. “These asteroids were initially thought to be the exposed cores of differentiated planetesimals, a hypothesis based on their spectral similarity to iron meteorites.”
The Webb data point to hydroxyl and perhaps water on Psyche’s surface. The hydrated minerals could result from external sources, including impactors. If the hydration is native or endogenous, then Psyche may have a different evolutionary history than current models suggest.
“Asteroids are leftovers from the planetary formation process, so their compositions vary depending on where they formed in the solar nebula,” said SwRI’s Dr. Anicia Arredondo, another co-author. “Hydration that is endogenous could suggest that Psyche is not the remnant core of a protoplanet. Instead, it could suggest that Psyche originated beyond the ‘snow line,’ the minimum distance from the Sun where protoplanetary disc temperatures are low enough for volatile compounds to condense into solids, before migrating to the outer main belt.”
However, the paper found the variability in the strength of the hydration features across the observations implies a heterogeneous distribution of hydrated minerals. This variability suggests a complex surface history that could be explained by impacts from carbonaceous chondrite asteroids thought to be very hydrated.
Understanding the location of asteroids and their compositions tells us how materials in the solar nebula were distributed and have evolved since formation. How water is distributed in our solar system will provide insight into the distribution of water in other solar systems and, because water is necessary for all life on Earth, will drive where to look for potential life, both in our solar system and beyond.
NASA’s Webb telescope, developed in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies, is part of the Space Telescope Science Institute, operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. The Psyche mission is led by Arizona State University. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is responsible for mission management, operations and navigation.
To access the “Estimate of water and hydroxyl abundance on asteroid (16) Psyche from JWST data” paper, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.12162. The paper will be published in the Planetary Science Journal and will be accessible at 10.3847/PSJ/ad66b9.
For more information, visit https://www.swri.org/planetary-science.
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
"Estimate of water and hydroxyl abundance on asteroid (16) Psyche from JWST data”
Agence France-Presse
August 13, 2024
Archive image of the Inspiration4 mission, SpaceX's first space tourism mission, on September 16, 2021. © Handout / Inspiration4/AFP
SpaceX is aiming to break new barriers in polar exploration with the first manned space mission over the Earth's poles -- a private flight commanded by a crypto entrepreneur later this year, the company said Tuesday.
The mission, dubbed "Fram2" after a 19th century polar expedition schooner, is due to last between three to five days, and was purchased by Chun Wang, a wealthy bitcoin pioneer who founded f2pool and stakefish, for an undisclosed amount.
He will be joined by three polar experts: Norwegian filmmaker Jannicke Mikkelsen, German robotics researcher Rabea Rogge, and Australian polar adventurer Eric Philips.
It is the latest foray by the aerospace industry into private space tourism, growing fast in the United States in recent years.
"From mission proposal, planning, trajectory design, to crew selection, everything has been done by the customer," Wang, reportedly born and raised in China but now a Maltese citizen, said in a post on X.
"A new chapter in space exploration is unfolding before our eyes," he said.
Satellites have flown over the poles, but due to the Earth's rotation, reaching them can take more power, while radiation can also be an issue, astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told AFP.
"To date, the highest inclination achieved by human spaceflight has been the Soviet Vostok 6 mission, at 65°," according to the mission website.
The poles are not visible from the International Space Station (ISS).
The mission will use a SpaceX Dragon capsule equipped with an observation dome. The craft will fly at an altitude of between 265 and 280 miles (425 and 450 kilometers), according to SpaceX, owned by mercurial billionaire Elon Musk.
The crew plans to conduct research including taking the first X-ray images in space and studying an aurora-like light phenomenon, according to SpaceX.
SpaceX has flown 13 manned missions in the last four years. It carries Nasa astronauts to the ISS, but has also carried out several space tourism missions, including the first in 2021, named Inspiration4, financed by American billionaire Jared Isaacman.
"Until 2021, space missions were solely the privilege of governments," Wang wrote, adding: "Then @inspiration4x came along and changed everything."
SpaceX is set to launch another private mission, Polaris Dawn on August 26, carrying four crew members including Isaacman.
It is scheduled to include the first private spacewalk.
Syris Valentine, GristNaveena Sadasivam, Grist
August 12, 2024
'Satellite in space. Image features elements furnished by NASA' [Shutterstock]
This story was originally published by Grist.
On a blustery day in early March, the who’s who of methane research gathered at Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara, California. Dozens of people crammed into a NASA mission control center. Others watched from cars pulled alongside roads just outside the sprawling facility. Many more followed a livestream. They came from across the country to witness the launch of an oven-sized satellite capable of detecting the potent planet-warming gas from space.
The amount of methane, the primary component in natural gas, in the atmosphere has been rising steadily over the last few decades, reaching nearly three times as much as preindustrial times. About a third of methane emissions in the United States occur during the extraction of fossil fuels as the gas seeps from wellheads, pipelines, and other equipment. The rest come from agricultural operations, landfills, coal mining, and other sources. Some of these leaks are large enough to be seen from orbit. Others are miniscule, yet contribute to a growing problem.
Identifying and repairing them is a relatively straightforward climate solution. Methane has a warming potential about 80 times higher than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, so reducing its levels in the atmosphere can help curb global temperature rise. And unlike other industries where the technology to decarbonize is still relatively new, oil and gas companies have long had the tools and know-how to fix these leaks.
MethaneSAT, the gas-detecting device launched in March, is the latest in a growing armada of satellites designed to detect methane. Led by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, or EDF, and more than six years in the making, the satellite has the ability to circle the globe 15 times a day and monitor regions where 80 percent of the world’s oil and gas is produced. Along with other satellites in orbit, it is expected to dramatically change how regulators and watchdogs police the oil and gas industry.
“Companies do a good job of complying with the law, but the law has been insufficient,” said Danielle Fugere, president and chief counsel at As You Sow, a nonprofit group that has used shareholder advocacy to push fossil fuel producers to tackle climate change. “So this change will increase incentives for reducing methane emissions.”
Those at Vandenberg or watching online were a bit on edge. A lot could go wrong. The SpaceX rocket carrying the satellite into orbit could explode. A week before, engineers worried about the device that holds the $88 million spacecraft in place during launch and pushes it into space. “That made us a little nervous,” recalled Steven Wofsy, an atmospheric scientist at Harvard University and a key architect of the project along with Steven Hamburg, the scientist who leads MethaneSAT at EDF. If that didn’t go wrong, the satellite could still fail to deploy or have difficulty communicating with its minders on Earth.
They needn’t have worried. A couple hours after the rocket blasted off, Wofsy, Hamburg, and his colleagues watched on a television at a hotel about two miles away as their creation was ejected into orbit. It was a jubilant moment for members of the team, many of whom had traveled to Vandenberg with their partners, parents, and children. “Everybody spontaneously broke into a cheer,” Wofsy said. “You [would’ve] thought that your team scored a touchdown during overtime.”
The data the satellite generates in the coming months will be publicly accessible — available for environmental advocates, oil and gas companies, and regulators alike. Each has an interest in the information MethaneSAT will beam home. Climate advocates hope to use it to push for more stringent regulations governing methane emissions and to hold negligent operators accountable. Fossil fuel companies, many of which do their own monitoring, could use the information to pinpoint and repair leaks, avoiding penalties and recouping a resource they can sell. Regulators could use the data to identify hotspots, develop targeted policies, and catch polluters. For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency is taking steps to be able to use third-party data to enforce its air quality regulations, developing guidelines for using the intelligence satellites like MethaneSAT will provide. The satellite is so important to the agency’s efforts that EPA Administrator Michael Regan was in Santa Barbara for the launch as was a congressional lawmaker. Activists hailed the satellite as a much-needed tool to address climate change.
“This is going to radically change the amount of empirically observed data that we have and vastly increase our understanding of the amount of methane emissions that are currently happening and what needs to be done to reduce them,” said Dakota Raynes, a research and policy manager at the environmental nonprofit Earthworks. “I’m hopeful that gaining that understanding is going to help continue to shift the narrative towards [the] phase down of fossil fuels.”
With the satellite safely orbiting 370 miles above the Earth’s surface, the mission enters a critical second phase. In the coming months, EDF researchers will calibrate equipment and ensure the satellite works as planned. By next year, it is expected to transmit reams of information from around the world. Its success will depend on the quality of the data it can produce and — perhaps more importantly — how that data is put to use.
The European Space Agency released the first global measurements of atmospheric methane three years after launching the Environmental Satellite, or Envisat, in 2002. In 2009, three years before the Envisat mission ended, Japan’s Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite, or GOSAT, made its orbital debut. These early progenitors established a new era of worldwide emissions accounting, but they lacked the geographic precision required to inform meaningful action.
In the years since, a hodgepodge of governmental agencies and private-sector organizations has deployed 23 more satellites, including MethaneSAT, to glean additional insights. Some improved upon the pioneering technology by mapping global emissions with greater fidelity and surveying the world with what one could call a wide-angle view. But most measure emissions in targeted areas with what amounts to a telephoto lens.
The images they collect, however, are nothing like what a Nikon might capture, because methane, like most gases, is invisible to humans. So these satellites rely on a spectrometer to reveal the infrared signature the gas leaves behind, exposing not only its presence, but its concentration.
How large a chunk of the world a satellite can map, and the resolution it can provide, depends primarily upon the magnifying power of its telescope. Typically, a higher magnification allows the examination of smaller areas in greater detail, while a lower magnification is best for analyzing vast areas in less detail. The instruments aboard each satellite have all been designed with a unique combination of sensitivities and resolutions tailored to its primary mission. Given GOSAT, for example, was designed to track methane and greenhouse gas concentrations over the entire planet in coarse resolutions, it would have no trouble measuring methane emissions across Southern California and beyond, but it would condense Santa Monica into a single pixel. On the other hand, with the privately owned GHGSat focused on taking images of precise areas and identifying the facilities responsible for emissions, its satellites could map the city of Santa Monica in exquisite detail and pinpoint a sizable methane leak to within 80 to 160 feet, but would struggle to provide any indication of what’s happening beyond the city.
EDF saw an opportunity to create a satellite capable of doing both by designing MethaneSAT’s instrument to take images that cover 125 miles of Earth’s surface, enough to capture most of an oil field spanning dozens of miles in a single frame with sufficient resolution to identify small groups of wells and other infrastructure within that expanse. The nonprofit and its researchers began to see the need for such a device about a decade ago, at the height of the fracking boom. The organization was coordinating the work of hundreds of scientists who “were creating more data about methane emissions from the oil and gas industry in the U.S. than anyone had,” Hamburg said, “by orders of magnitude.”
The Brent Charlie oil rig is carried by the crane ship Pioneering Spirit as it waits off the coast of Redcar for tides to be right before it is towed by barge into the River Tees for dismantling at the Able UK yard on July 12, 2024 in Middlesbrough, England. The 32,000-ton Brent Charlie is the last rig from the Brent Field in the North Sea off the UK's east coast. At one point, the Brent Field produced 184 million barrels of oil a year, earning billions for Shell and tax revenues for the Exchequer. (Photo by Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)
EDF flew spectrometers aboard airplanes over oil fields, and discovered that the EPA had severely underestimated the amount of methane emitted by oil and gas operations. Although these studies proved invaluable, the scientists couldn’t conduct these labor-intensive, aerial campaigns at the scale or frequency required to understand global methane emissions and how they evolved. That piecemeal approach made clear that no one understood the extent of the problem. Even for the areas they could image, “you’re getting snapshots,” Hamburg said, “but not a motion picture.”
Hamburg and his colleagues set out to determine what it would take to monitor the world’s most productive oil fields on a near-daily basis to determine where, and how much, methane escaped and how those emissions were changing over time. “We’d done enough looking,” Hamburg said, “that we didn’t think the existing satellites or the planned satellites were going to provide that data.”
As they pondered how to fill this gap, Robert Harris, EDF’s lead scientist until his passing in 2021, encouraged Hamburg to get in touch with Wofsy. Wofsy had promised himself he would never get involved in a satellite mission, but the prospect of the measurements this one could collect became too tantalizing to pass up. The more the two Stevens came together to talk and “mind meld,” Hamburg said, the more they realized they shared a vision for a mission that could slot neatly between wide-angle global mappers and the telephoto point imagers, filling a gap that, until then, no one had aimed to address.
The ability to measure emissions across large areas and identify the worst polluters could reshape how regulators design policy. In recent years, climate scientists and activists have spotlighted “super emitters” — large leaks spewing a disproportionate amount of methane. But EDF’s research has shown that focusing on gross polluters risks overlooking the cumulative contributions of small, persistent leaks. In 2022, its researchers found that although low-production oil and gas wells produce just 6 percent of the nation’s fossil fuels, they generate around half of the industry’s methane emissions. That is despite releasing pollution at less than one-tenth the rate of even the smallest super emitters. The data coming from EDF’s new satellite will be able to help quantify and constrain the emissions coming from gross polluters and smaller sources alike — something that will prove invaluable.
“MethaneSAT will play a very crucial role with advocacy and policymaking,” by showing not only a given region’s total methane emissions, but how that changes over time, said Jean-Francois Gauthier, a senior vice president at GHGSat, which operates 12 of its own methane-monitoring satellites and markets services and data to both the public and private sectors, including fossil fuel companies. “Now you can start having very targeted policies and regulations.”
Given the sophistication of tools like MethaneSAT and the four satellites GHGSat plans to add to its flotilla later this year, it is ironic that the EPA’s current enforcement strategy is fairly low tech. The agency requires the fossil fuel industry to report its own emissions and augments that data with occasional aerial surveillance — an approach that limits it to capturing emissions for a specific period of time over a limited area. Oil and gas operators must estimate the emissions from their equipment, but the methodology is largely based on outdated data, and they aren’t required to report large releases due to malfunctions.
As a result, the EPA is underestimating the scale of methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by as much as 76 percent, according to researchers. Shayla Powell, an EPA representative told Grist that the discrepancies between the agency’s analysis and satellite-based estimates may stem from the needto draw national conclusions from local observations. Super-emitters “may not be accurately captured using current methods,” the representative said. “EPA continues to work with researchers to compare results, identify specific sources of discrepancies, and make improvements.”
Recognizing the global reach and nearly real-time coverage that satellites can provide, the EPA plans to capitalize on all that data. Its new Superemitter Program will allow certified third parties to provide the agency with data documenting leaks. It will then reach out to the company responsible for the emissions, which will have five days to open an investigation and 15 days to report to the EPA. A provision in the Inflation Reduction Act directs the EPA to charge $900 per metric ton of methane released beyond a certain threshold. The trove of information coming back from space can help the agency measure how much operators are spewing.
The EPA places strict detection and resolution requirements on the data it will accept, but even if one firm’s satellite can’t take photos that meet those guidelines, its findings could inform the work of others and provide the agency with actionable information. “In the space business, it’s called ‘tip and cue,’” said Riley Duren, who leads Carbon Mapper, a nonprofit dedicated to measuring planet-warming emissions. “If one satellite sees something, it can tip off another one and they can queue up measurements to follow up.”
But whether all the data will ultimately help reduce methane emissions remains an open question. For years, Sharon Wilson, a self-proclaimed methane hunter and director of the environmental group Oilfield Witness, has been scouring oil and gas fields nationwide and documenting massive leaks. She uses an optical gas imaging camera, which makes the invisible emissions visible, to document how fossil fuel operators have been flaring natural gas with impunity. Over the last eight years, she has submitted more than 500 complaints with video evidence of leaks in the Permian Basin in West Texas and other oil fields to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the agency responsible for enforcing environmental rules in the state. It has rarely taken action. Wilson worries that any satellite data will similarly be dismissed.
“The bottom line on this whole thing is it doesn’t matter how many thermographers we have, boots on the ground, satellites flying in the air, people with drones and airplanes and all the other technology, none of it matters if you don’t stop methane,” Wilson said. “None of it counts.”
If operators fail to take action after being notified through the EPA’s Superemitter Program, it’s unclear whether enforcement action will fall to the states. The EPA has delegated responsibility for enforcing parts of the Clean Air Act to states, which has led to disparities in accountability. The new methane rules finalized by the EPA late last year require states to develop an implementation plan. If state plans are inadequate, the agency is expected to roll out a federal one. When the EPA has taken this approach with other pollutants such as smog, states like Texas and Louisiana have often submitted inadequate implementation plans.
How the EPA chooses to follow through may not be clear for a couple more years. The agency is currently vetting those interested in submitting methane data. Publication of any data third parties provide may not occur until 2026, at which point the EPA will need to take appropriate action against polluters.
“You don’t just need people to collect the data attributed to an operator or a facility,” said Raynes, the Earthworks researcher. “You also need people who are actually going to follow through to make sure that that operator fixes the problem. There’s a little less clarity in all of [this] about whether that’s being accurately planned for.”
Satellites — no matter how sophisticated — have limitations, and the responsibility to take action falls to regulators. Ultimately, having more granular data makes it more difficult for oil and gas companies and regulators to deny that leaks exist. “Having that greater access to that finer level of actual, empirically-observed measurement is going to change the conversation about methane,” said Raynes.
This article has been updated to clarify that the images of the methane leaks in Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas were captured by Carbon Mapper.
This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.
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