METHANESAT
- ENVIRONMENT
News: Meet MethaneSAT, a satellite which will ‘name and shame’ methane
emitters
What's in the news?
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MethaneSAT — a satellite
which will track and measure methane emissions at a global scale — was launched
aboard a SpaceX Falcon9 rocket.
MethaneSat:
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It will track and measure methane emissions at
a global scale.
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It will provide more
details and have a much wider field of view than any of its predecessors.
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The entity behind
MethaneSAT is the Environmental Defense
Fund (EDF) — a US-based nonprofit environmental advocacy group.
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It is developed in collaboration with Harvard University, the
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the New Zealand Space Agency.
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It will orbit the Earth
15 times a day, monitoring the oil and gas sector.
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It will create a large
amount of data, which will tell “how much methane is coming from where, who’s
responsible, and are those emissions going up or down over time”,
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The data collected by
this will be made public for free in near real-time. This will allow
stakeholders and regulators to take action to reduce methane emissions.
Features:
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It is equipped with a high-resolution infrared sensor and a
spectrometer.
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It can track differences
in methane concentrations as small as
three parts per billion in the atmosphere, which enables it to pick up
smaller emissions sources than the previous satellites.
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It also has a wide-camera view — of about 200 km by 200
km — allowing it to identify larger emitters so-called “super emitters”.
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The collected data will
be analysed using cloud-computing and AI
technology developed by Google — the company is a mission partner — and the
data will be made public through Google’s Earth Engine platform.
Go back to basics:
Methane:
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Methane is an invisible but strong greenhouse gas, and the second largest contributor to global
warming after carbon dioxide, responsible for 30 percent of global heating since the Industrial Revolution.
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According to the United
Nations Environment Programme, over a period of 20 years, methane is 80 times more potent at warming than carbon dioxide.
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The gas also contributes
to the formation of ground-level ozone
— a colorless and highly irritating gas that forms just above the Earth’s
surface.
○ According
to a 2022 report, exposure to ground-level ozone could be contributing to one
million premature deaths every year.
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The fossil fuel operations, which account for about 40 percent of all
human-caused methane emissions.