On March 4, 2024, MethaneSAT launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, becoming what its operators called the first satellite developed by an environmental nonprofit. The mission was led by the Environmental Defense Fund, working with the Government of New Zealand and its space agency, Harvard University, and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, with data distributed publicly through Google Earth Engine.
The satellite carried an imaging spectrometer tuned to the short-wave infrared band that methane absorbs, letting it measure concentration changes as small as three parts per billion over wide areas while orbiting Earth about 15 times a day. Crucially, MethaneSAT was built to see not just large point sources but the smaller, diffuse emissions that other satellites miss. Turning raw spectra into emission-rate maps required heavy computation - a pipeline combining cloud processing, computer vision, and inversion algorithms to estimate how much gas was leaking from specific oil and gas facilities and how those rates changed over time.
The goal was accountability: by quantifying leaks at the level of individual operators and publishing the data openly, MethaneSAT aimed to pressure the oil and gas sector to plug the leaks responsible for a large share of near-term warming. The mission ended earlier than planned when operators lost contact with the satellite on June 20, 2025, after just over a year in orbit, but its open methane data and processing approach influenced the broader field of satellite emissions monitoring.
Why business readers should care: MethaneSAT shows AI moving from forecasting to enforcement - turning a fleet of pixels into operator-level accountability data that regulators and investors can act on, a model of transparency that puts measurable pressure on specific companies.