An $88 million satellite backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos that detected oil and fuel business emissions of the highly effective greenhouse fuel methane has been lost in space, the group that operates mentioned on Tuesday (July 1, 2025).
MethaneSAT had been accumulating emissions information and pictures from drilling websites, pipelines, and processing services world wide since March, however went astray round 10 days in the past, the Environmental Defense Fund, which led the initiative, mentioned.
Its final identified location was over Svalbard in Norway and EDF mentioned it didn’t anticipate it to be recovered because it had lost energy.
“We’re seeing this as a setback, not a failure,” Amy Middleton, senior vice chairman at EDF, advised Reuters. “We’ve made so much progress and so much has been learned that if we hadn’t taken this risk, we wouldn’t have any of these learnings.”
The launch of MethaneSAT in March 2024 was a milestone in a years-long marketing campaign by EDF to carry accountable the greater than 120 nations that in 2021 pledged to curb their methane emissions.
It additionally sought to assist implement an additional promise from 50 oil and fuel firms made on the Dubai COP28 local weather summit in December 2023 to get rid of methane and routine fuel flaring.
Methane is a potent greenhouse fuel, with 80 instances the warming energy of carbon dioxide over a 20-year interval.
Scientists say capping leaks from oil and fuel wells and gear is subsequently one of many quickest methods to begin tackling the issue of worldwide warming.
While MethaneSAT was not the one venture to publish satellite information on methane emissions, its backers mentioned it offered extra element on emissions sources and it partnered with Google to to create a publicly-available international map of emissions.
ENGINEERS INVESTIGATING
EDF reported the lost satellite to federal businesses together with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Space Force on Tuesday, it mentioned.
Building and launching the satellite price $88 million, based on the EDF. The group had acquired a $100 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund in 2020 and acquired different main monetary help from Arnold Ventures, the Robertson Foundation and the TED Audacious Project and EDF donors. The venture was additionally partnered with the New Zealand Space Agency.
EDF mentioned it had insurance coverage to cowl the loss and its engineers had been investigating what had occurred.
The group mentioned it will proceed to make use of its sources, together with plane with methane-detecting spectrometers, to search for methane leaks.
It additionally mentioned it was too early to say whether or not it will search to launch one other satellite however believed MethaneSAT proved {that a} extremely delicate instrument “could see total methane emissions, even at low levels, over wide areas.”
Despite the efforts to extend transparency on emissions, methane “super-emitters” have hardly ever taken motion when alerted that they’re leaking methane, the United Nations mentioned in a report final yr.
The stress on them to do has decreased because the United States beneath President Donald Trump’s second administration has successfully ended a U.S. program to gather greenhouse fuel information from main polluters and rescinded Biden-era guidelines aimed toward curbing methane.
