Both companies use an imaging technology known as spectroscopy, which involves splitting the light reflected by Earth’s surface into its constituent wavelengths. Methane and carbon dioxide each have their own spectroscopic signature. “It's not unlike being able to perceive the distinction in human fingerprints,” Duren told me.
The Carbon Mapper Coalition satellite, called Tanager-1, came from a partnership between Planet Labs, which developed the satellite, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which developed the particular spectrometer used onboard. Duren helped create the tech during his nearly 28-year career at JPL, where his research revealed the outsized importance of super-emitters. That helped inspire Duren to found Carbon Mapper in 2020, though until now the organization has mostly done suborbital aerial surveys to track methane and carbon dioxide emissions.
Promisingly, he’s found that distributing his team’s findings often leads to a rapid response. “When we've shared our data with oil and gas companies, landfill operators, and regulators, what they tell us is nearly half of the emissions that we're reporting were previously unknown,” Duren told me. “And in many cases, they can quickly repair them.”
The data from these surveys is publicly accessible on the Carbon Mapper data portal, and the data from Tanager-1 will be published there as well. In addition to Planet Labs and JPL, other coalition partners include the California Air Resources Board, University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and RMI. To date, Carbon Mapper has raised over $130 million in philanthropic funding, from donors including the High Tide Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment.
Ultimately, Carbon Mapper aims to launch a constellation of more than 10 satellites, which together will detect and track up to 90% of high-emitting methane sources with near-daily frequency. But this will require funding beyond what the philanthropic sector is likely to pony up.
“Scaling up this to the full constellation and sustaining it will hinge on the ability of governments and the private sector to pay for data,” Duren told me. (MethaneSAT is also philanthropically supported.) “We're hopeful that as these programs scale up and we demonstrate their utility and the regulators depend on them, that we'll see governments begin to match what philanthropy has started,” Durian said.
If you want to watch the launch live, you can do so here.