1 2 3 4

EYE IN THE SKY: The microsatellite Claire has spotted a number of methane
plumes over the last four years, including at the following locations: 1) the
Balkan Region of western Turkmenistan; 2) a gas facility in Yamalo-Nenets
Autonomous Okrug, in northwestern Siberia; 3) the Permian Basin, in western
Texas; 4) the Lom Pangar Dam, in eastern Cameroon; and 5) a coal mine
in Shanxi, China. 6) Our newest satellite, Iris, launched in September and
underwent electromagnetic testing earlier this year.
GHGSAT (6)

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 EYES IN THE SKY
ENABLE ACTION
ON CLIMATE
CHANGE

MICROSATELLITES

SPOT MYSTERY

METHANE LEAKS

By JASON
McKEEVER, DYLAN
JERVIS & MATHIAS
STRUPLER

S O M E T H I N G N E W H A P P E N E D I N S PA C E I N J A N U A RY 2 0 1 9 .
For the first time, a previously unknown leak of natural gas was spotted
from orbit by a microsatellite, and then, because of that detection, plugged.
The microsatellite, Claire, had been flying since 2016. That day, Claire
was monitoring the output of a mud volcano in Central Asia when it spied a
plume of methane where none should be. Our team at GHGSat, in Montreal,
instructed the spacecraft to pan over and zero in on the origin of the plume,
which turned out to be a facility in an oil and gas field in Turkmenistan.
The need to track down methane leaks has never been more important.
In the slow-motion calamity that is climate change, methane emissions get
less public attention than the carbon dioxide coming from smokestacks and
tailpipes. But methane—which mostly comes from fossil-fuel production but
also from livestock farming and other sources—has an outsize impact. Mol-
ecule for molecule, methane traps 84 times as much heat in the atmosphere
as carbon dioxide does, and it accounts for about a quarter of the rise in
atmospheric temperatures. Worse, research from earlier this year shows
that we might be enormously underestimating the amount released—by as
much as 25 to 40 percent.

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VERY PROUD
PARENTS: The
team at the Space
Flight Laboratory,
in Toronto, with
a brand new
15-kilogram
methane-sensing
microsatellite.

Satellites have been able to see greenhouse gases like methane and car- is the simpler one: Methane has value whether
bon dioxide from space for nearly 20 years, but it took a confluence of there’s a greenhouse-gas trading system or not.
need and technological innovation to make such observations practical Markets for greenhouse gases motivate the
and accurate enough to do them for profit. Through some clever engi- operators of industrial sites to better mea-
neering and a more focused goal, our company has managed to build sure their emissions so they can control and
a 15-kilogram microsatellite and perform feats of detection that previ- ultimately reduce them. Existing, mostly
ously weren’t possible, even with a US $100 million, 1,000-kg spacecraft. ground-based methods using systems like flux
Those scientific behemoths do their job admirably, but they view things chambers, eddy covariance towers, and optical
on a kilometer scale. Claire can resolve methane emissions down to tens gas imaging were fairly expensive, of limited
of meters. So a polluter (or anybody else) can determine not just what accuracy, and varied as to their geographic
gas field is involved but which well in that field. availability. Our company’s bet was that indus-
Since launching Claire, our first microsatellite, we’ve improved on both trial operators would flock to a single, less
the core technology—a miniaturized version of an instrument known expensive, more precise solution that could
as a wide-angle Fabry-Pérot imaging spectrometer—and the spacecraft spot greenhouse-gas emissions from individ-
itself. Our second methane-seeking satellite, dubbed Iris, launched this ual industrial facilities anywhere in the world.
past September, and a third is scheduled to go up before the end of the Once we’d decided on our business plan, the
year. When we’re done, there will be nowhere on Earth for methane only question was: Could we do it?
leaks to hide. One part of the question had already been
answered, to a degree, by pioneering space
THE CREATION OF CLAIRE and its siblings was driven by a business missions such as Europe’s Envisat (which oper-
case and a technology challenge. The business part was born in mid-2011, ated from 2002 to 2012) and Japan’s GOSat
when Quebec (GHGSat’s home province) and California each announced (launched in 2009). These satellites measure
that they would implement a market-based “cap and trade” system. The surface-level trace gases using spectrometers
systems would attribute a value to each ton of carbon emitted by indus- that collect sunlight scattering off the earth.
trial sites. Major emitters would be allotted a certain number of tons of The spectrometers break down the incoming
carbon—or its equivalent in methane and other greenhouse gases—that light by wavelength. Molecules in the light’s
they could release into the atmosphere each year. Those that needed path will absorb a certain pattern of wave-
to emit more could then purchase emissions credits from those that lengths, leaving dark bands in the spectrum.
needed less. Over time, governments could shrink the total allotment The greater the concentration of those mole-
to begin to reduce the drivers of climate change. cules, the darker the bands. This method can
Even in 2011, there was a wider, multibillion-dollar market for carbon measure methane concentrations from orbit
emissions, which was growing steadily as more jurisdictions imposed with a precision that’s better than 1 percent of
taxes or implemented carbon-trading mechanisms. By 2019, these car- background levels.
bon markets covered 22 percent of global emissions and earned gov- While those satellites proved the concept
ernments $45 billion, according to the World Bank’s State and Trends of methane tracking, their technology was
of Carbon Pricing 2020. far from what we needed. For one thing, the
Despite those billions, it’s methane, not carbon dioxide, that has instruments are huge. The spectrometer por-
become the focus of our systems. One reason is technological—our origi- tion of Envisat, called SCIAMACHY (SCanning
GHGSAT

nal instrument was better tuned for methane. But the business reason Imaging Absorption spectroMeter for Atmo-

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 SENSING METHANE FROM SPACE
The satellite measures the way a plume of gas
[pink] absorbs portions of the spectrum of
reflected sunlight. The key instrument involved
is called a wide-angle Fabry-Pérot etalon.
Sun
Two infrared rays of different
wavelengths streaking up to
the satellite [top] from different
points on the ground enter the
satellite at different angles.
The etalon is made up of two partially mirrored surfaces [bottom]
held micrometers apart. A portion of the light passes through both
surfaces; the rest reflects within the mirrored cavity before it passes
through. If the light is of the right wavelength and enters at a particular
angle, it will constructively interfere with itself [left]. The result is an
angle-dependent wavelength filter [right].

Microsatellite

1,640 nm 1,650 nm
Focal-
plane
array

Imaging
optics

Methane
plume Fabry-Pérot Partially
etalon reflective
glass

θ2
θ1 θ2 θ2
Well θ1

Ground Earth

spheric CHartographY), contained nearly
200 kg of complex optics; the entire space-
craft carried eight other scientific instruments
and weighed 8.2 metric tons. GOSat, which is
dedicated to greenhouse-gas sensing, weighs
1.75 metric tons.
Furthermore, these systems were designed to
measure gas concentrations across the whole
planet, quickly and repeatedly, in order to
inform global climate modeling. Their instru-
ments scan huge swaths of land and then
average greenhouse-gas levels over tens or
hundreds of square kilometers. And that is
far too coarse to pinpoint an industrial site
responsible for rogue emissions.
To achieve our goals, we needed to design
something that was the first of its kind—an
orbiting hyperspectral imager with spatial
resolution in the tens of meters. And to make
it affordable enough to launch, we had to fit it
in a 20-by-20-by-20-centimeter package.
THE MOST CRITICAL enabling technology to meet those constraints
was our spectrometer—the wide-angle Fabry-Pérot etalon (WAF-P). (An
etalon is an interferometer made from two partially reflective plates.) To
help you understand what that is, we’ve first got to explain a more common
type of spectrometer and how it works in a hyperspectral imaging system.
Hyperspectral imaging detects a wide range of wavelengths, some of
which, of course, are beyond the visible. To achieve such detection, you
need both a spectrometer and an imager.
The spectrometers in SCIAMACHY are based on diffraction gratings. A
diffraction grating disperses the incoming light as a function of its wave-
length—just as a prism spreads out the spectrum of white light into a rain-
bow. In space-based hyperspectral imaging systems, one dimension of
the imager is used for spectral dispersion, and the other is used for spatial
imaging. By imaging a narrow slit of a scene at the correct orientation, you
get a spectrum at each point along that thin strip of land. As the spacecraft
travels, sequential strips can be imaged to form a ­two-dimensional array
of points, each of which has a full spectrum associated with it.
If the incoming light has passed through a gas—say, Earth’s atmosphere—
in a region tainted with methane, certain bands in the infrared part of
that spectrum should be dimmer than otherwise in a pattern character-
istic of that chemical.

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 light’s radial position within the scene. Since
we’re looking at light transmitted through
the atmosphere, we end up with dark rings
at specific radii corresponding to molecular
absorption lines.
The etalon can be miniaturized more eas-
ily than a diffraction-grating spectrometer,
because the spectral discrimination arises
from interference that happens within a very
small gap of tens to hundreds of microme-
ters; no large path lengths or beam separation
is required. Furthermore, since the etalon
consists of substrates that are parallel to one
another, it doesn’t add significantly to aberra-
tions, so you can use relatively straightforward
optical-design techniques to obtain sufficient
spatial resolution.
However, there are complications associ-
ated with the WAF-P imaging spectrometer.
For example, the imager behind the etalon
picks up both the image of the scene (where
the gas well is) and the interference pattern
PUTTING IT TOGETHER: To determine the complete spectrum of an entire scene,
the satellite must take up to 200 images as it passes overhead [top]. That way (the methane spectrum). That is, the spectral
each feature will be measured at all the relevant wavelengths [red rings, bottom]. rings are embedded in—and corrupted by—the
The process, called a retrieval, reproduces an image of a methane plume. actual image of the patch of Earth the satellite
is pointing at. So, from a single camera frame,
Such a spectral-imaging system works well, but making it compact is you can’t distinguish variability in how much
challenging for several reasons. One challenge is the need to minimize light reflects off the surface from changes in the
optical aberrations to achieve a sharp image of ground features and emis- amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
sion plumes. However, in remote sensing, the signal strength (and hence Separating spatial and spectral information, so
signal-to-noise ratio) is driven by the aperture size, and the larger this is, that we can pinpoint the origin of a methane
the more difficult it is to minimize aberrations. Adding a dispersive grat- plume, took some innovation.
ing to the system leads to additional complexity in the optical system.
A Fabry-Pérot etalon can be much more compact without the need for THE COMPUTATIONAL PROCESS used to
a complex imaging system, despite certain surmountable drawbacks. extract gas concentrations from spectral mea-
It is essentially two partially mirrored pieces of glass held very close surements is called a retrieval. The first step in
together to form a reflective cavity. Imagine a beam of light of a certain getting this to work for the WAF-P was charac-
wavelength entering the cavity at a slight angle through one of the mir- terizing the instrument properly before launch.
rors. A fraction of that beam would zip across the cavity, squeak straight That produces a detailed model that can help
through the other mirror, and continue on to a lens that focuses it onto predict precisely the spectral response of the
a pixel on an imager placed a short distance away. The rest of that beam system for each pixel.
of light would bounce back to the front mirror and then across to the But that’s just the beginning. Separating the
back mirror. Again, a small fraction would pass through, the rest would etalon’s mixing of spectral and spatial infor-
continue to bounce between the mirrors, and the process would repeat. mation took some algorithmic magic. We over-
All that bouncing around adds distance to the light’s paths toward the came this issue by designing a protocol that
pixel. If the light’s angle and its wavelength obey a particular relation- captures a sequence of 200 overlapping images
ship to the distance between the mirrors, all that light will constructively as the satellite flies over a site. At our satellite’s
interfere with itself. Where that relation holds, a set of bright concentric orbit, that means maximizing the time we have
rings forms. Different wavelengths and different angles would produce to acquire images by continuously adjusting
a different set of rings. the satellite’s orientation. In other words, we
In an imaging system with a Fabry-Pérot etalon like the ones in our have the satellite stare at the site as it passes
satellites, the radius of the ring on the imager is roughly proportional to by, like a rubbernecking driver on a highway
the ray angle. What this means for our system is that the etalon acts as passing a car wreck.
GHGSAT (3)

an angle-­dependent filter. So rather than dispersing the light by wave- The next step in the retrieval procedure is
length, we filter the light to specific wavelengths, depending on the to align the images, basically tracking all the

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 ground locations within the scene through
the sequence of images. This gives us a col-
lection of up to 200 readings where a feature,
say, a leaking gas well, passes across the com-
plete interference pattern. This effectively is
measuring the same spot on Earth at decreas-
ing infrared wavelengths as that spot moves
outward from the center of the image. If the
methane concentration is anomalously high,
this leads to small but predictable changes in
signal level at specific positions on the image.
Our retrievals software then compares these
changes to its internal model of the system’s
spectral response to extract methane levels in
parts per million.
At this point, the WAF-P’s drawbacks
become an advantage. Some other satel-
lites use separate instruments to visualize
the ground and sense the methane or CO 2
spectra. They then have to realign those
two. Our system acquires both at once, so
the gas plume automatically aligns with its
point of origin down to the level of tens of
meters. Then there’s the advantage of high
spatial resolution. Other systems, such as
­Tropomi ­(TROPOspheric Monitoring Instru-
ment, launched in 2017), must average meth-
ane density across a 7-kilometer-wide pixel.
The peak concentration of a plume that Claire
could spot would be so severely diluted by
­Tropomi’s resolution that it would seem only
1/200th as strong. So high-spatial-resolution
systems like Claire can detect weaker emit-
ters, not just pinpoint their location.
Just handing a customer an image of their
methane plume on a particular day is useful,
but it’s not a complete picture. For weaker
emitters, measurement noise can make it dif-
ficult to detect methane point sources from a
single observation. But temporal averaging of
multiple observations using our analytics tools
reduces the noise: Even with a single satellite
we can make 25 or more observations of a site
per year, cloud cover permitting.
Using that average, we then produce an
estimation of the methane emission rate. The
process takes snapshots of methane density
measurements of the plume column and cal-
culates how much methane must be leak-
ing per hour to generate that kind of plume.
Retrieving the emission rate requires knowl-
edge of local wind conditions, because the
excess methane density depends not only on
the emission rate but also on how quickly the
wind transports the emitted gas out of the area.
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WE’VE LEARNED A LOT in the four years since Claire started its obser-
vations. And we’ve managed to put some of those lessons into practice
in our next generation of microsatellites, of which Iris is the first. The
biggest lesson is to focus on methane and leave carbon dioxide for later.
If methane is all we want to measure, we can adjust the design of
the etalon so that it better measures methane’s corner of the infrared
spectrum, instead of being broad enough to catch CO2’s as well. This,
coupled with better optics that keep out extraneous light, should result
in a 10-fold increase in methane sensitivity. So Iris and the satellites to
follow will be able to spot smaller leaks than Claire can.
We also discovered that our next satellites would need better radiation
shielding. Radiation in orbit is a particular problem for the satellite’s
imaging chip. Before launching Claire, we’d done careful calculations
of how much shielding it needed, which were then balanced with the
increased cost of the shielding’s weight. Nevertheless, Claire’s imager
has been losing pixels more quickly than expected. (Our software par-
tially compensates for the loss.) So Iris and the rest of the next genera-
tion sport heavier radiation shields.
Another improvement involves data downloads. Claire has made about
6,000 observations in its first four years. The data is sent to Earth by
radio as the satellite streaks past a single ground station in northern
Canada. We don’t want future satellites to run into limits in the number
of observations they make just because they don’t have enough time
to download the data before their next appointment with a methane
leak. So Iris is packed with more memory than Claire has, and the new
micro­satellite carries an experimental laser downlink in addition to its
regular radio antenna. If all goes to plan, the laser should boost down-
load speeds 1,000-fold, to 1 gigabit per second.
IN ITS POLAR ORBIT, 500 kilometers above Earth, Claire passes over
every part of the planet once every two weeks. With Iris, the frequency
of coverage effectively doubles. And the addition in December of Hugo
and three more microsatellites due to launch in 2021 will give us the
ability to check in on any site on the planet almost daily—depending
on cloud cover, of course.
With our microsatellites’ resolution and frequency, we should be able
to spot the bigger methane leaks, which make up about 70 percent of
emissions. Closing off the other 30 percent will require a closer look.
For example, with densely grouped facilities in a shale gas region, it
may not be possible to attribute a leak to a specific facility from space.
And a sizable leak detectable by satellite might be an indicator of sev-
eral smaller leaks. So we have developed an aircraft-mounted version
of the WAF-P instrument that can scan a site with 1-meter resolution.
The first such instrument took its test flights in late 2019 and is now in
commercial use monitoring a shale oil and gas site in British Columbia.
Within the next year we expect to deploy a second airplane-mounted
instrument and expand that service to the rest of North America.
By providing our customers with fine-grained methane surveys, we’re
allowing them to take the needed corrective action. Ultimately, these
leaks are repaired by crews on the ground, but our approach aims to
greatly reduce the need for in-person visits to facilities. And every
source of fugitive emissions that is spotted and stopped represents a
meaningful step toward mitigating climate change. n
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