The world’s first satellite capable of detecting sources of industrial carbon emissions from space has just arrived in orbit and looks set to be a game-changer. The satellite, called Vanguard, will be able to detect emissions from individual coal and gas power plants, large oil refineries, metallurgical plants and other polluting industrial facilities. On Saturday, November 11, Vanguard launched alongside two new methane monitoring satellites in the GHGSat constellation as part of the SpaceX Transporter 9 joint mission.

The Vanguard satellite will orbit Earth at an altitude of 300 miles (500 km) and photograph every point on the planet every two weeks.

The satellite, developed in Montreal by Canadian company GHGSat, uses a new device invented by the company that is preconfigured on its existing fleet of satellites that monitor emissions of methane, another dangerous greenhouse gas. GHGSat launched its first methane monitoring satellite, a demonstrator named Claire, in 2016 and has since gained fame for its groundbreaking ability to detect methane leaks from gas pipelines, hidden emissions from landfills and even cow burps.

The team has now perfected its device, an innovative device called a wide-angle Fabry-Perot interferometer, to detect and measure emissions of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas.

GHGSat President Stéphane Germain explained that the device detects the presence of greenhouse gases by analyzing the unique pattern of light absorption by the air column above every point on Earth. Each chemical molecule absorbs light differently, and by analyzing the measurements, researchers can detect the presence of a particular gas of interest and quantify it.

“We are looking for very specific absorption lines,” Germain told Space.com. “The amount of gas in the atmosphere is then proportional to the amount of absorption of light at specific wavelengths. So we can measure the concentration of carbon dioxide in every pixel of our field of view.”

Because carbon dioxide concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere are generally much higher than methane concentrations, other satellites have previously had difficulty detecting individual human-made sources of the most common greenhouse gas. But this January, researchers using data from NASA’s Orbital Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) were able to measure fluctuations in carbon dioxide emissions produced by Europe’s largest coal-fired power plant. It was the first time in the world. But the new GHGSat satellite will provide such measurements every day.

“We have a 12 by 12 kilometer field of view [7,5 миль на 7,5 миль]where you have more than a million pixels or concentrations [вуглекислого газу]”said Germain. “We measure the concentration in each area, and if we see high concentrations in a particular location, reducing the wind of that location, that indicates a source.”

By comparing the data with visual images of the same location, researchers can identify each source of carbon emissions. Despite the groundbreaking technology, there may be less demand for GHGSat’s space-based measurements of carbon dioxide than for methane, said Aravind Ravichandran, Earth observation consultant at TerraWatch Space.

“It is relatively less destructive than methane, which is actually the holy grail,” Ravichandran told Space.com. “We know most of our sources of carbon dioxide. So, with carbon dioxide, it’s a case of controlling the underlying emissions, as opposed to methane, which gives new information about where the sources are.” Germain confirms that GHGSat’s primary interest in methane stems from the lack of other options for detecting gas leaks on a global scale.

“There was a clear and urgent commercial need to monitor methane emissions worldwide,” Germain said. “Most methane emissions are what we call fugitive emissions, which means you don’t necessarily know where or when they will occur. So satellites are ideal for this use.”

GHGSat currently operates a fleet of nine methane monitoring satellites and sells its data to oil and gas companies looking to reduce their carbon footprints and government regulators interested in monitoring pollutants around the world. The most likely customers for data from the new satellite are regulators.

Countries now self-report their carbon emissions according to their economic performance. Independent views of space will help confirm current predictions. Source