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In March 2024, a state-of-the-art methane-detecting satellite — the product of nearly a decade of work in Harvard labs — soared into space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. But a year later, MethaneSAT lost power in space, and its stream of data on emissions of the potent greenhouse gas went dark.

For scientists who worked on MethaneSAT, the moment was devastating.

“I was very saddened,” said Kelly Chance, a Harvard physicist who helped develop MethaneSAT’s spectroscopy tools. “We hoped for a long lifetime.”

But even with their satellite out of commission, the MethaneSAT team has work ahead. Scientists involved in the project said it will take them until next year to process the information collected by the satellite. And even though they hoped to walk away with more than 14 months of data, their research may continue to pave the way for new discoveries.

The MethaneSAT project was born in 2015 out of a collaboration between scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Environmental Defense Fund, the New Zealand Space Agency, and the Wofsy Lab at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period in the atmosphere, and scientists estimate that it has contributed to around 30 percent of global warming.

Because methane has a shorter lifespan in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, driving down methane emissions is an appealing target for climate policymakers. But there’s a catch: methane is often emitted from small point sources, like farms and leaky oil or gas wells, which can be hard for scientists to detect.

Detecting emissions sources — and replacing outdated data — is where MethaneSAT came in.

“In the early 2000s and 2010 timeframe, there was a lot of discussion about how much methane was emitted from the oil and gas value chain, and these numbers were based on obsolete measurements and obsolete measurement methods,” said Steven C. Wofsy, a professor of Atmospheric and Environmental Science and head of the Wofsy Greenhouse Gases and Biosphere-Atmosphere Exchange Group.

“Methane emissions to the atmosphere never provide useful economic return, and they’re always essentially wasting a resource,” Wofsy added. “So that made an attractive target.”

Wofsy began work on the project when the Environmental Defense Fund reached out to his lab to learn more about how methane could be measured from space. He pulled together colleagues from the Center for Astrophysics, who had been developing the CFA’s TEMPO satellite to analyze global air quality. The TEMPO work had been paused, meaning CFA scientists were eager to take on MethaneSAT, too.

“It was like the best possible luck you can imagine,” Wofsy said. “Here’s a whole science team that’s all skilled, all trained. They know exactly what to do.”

When MethaneSAT began monitoring emissions from space, scientists got a historic new look at methane pollution. For the first time, they could observe methane emissions across dispersed sources and at a global scale. And they could tell that major oil and gas basins, from Utah to Appalachia, were leaking methane at levels many times higher than limits the industry had agreed to.

“It operated for 14 months,” Wofsy said. “And we have an incredible amount of beautiful data over that 14 months — a small fraction of what we should have had or hoped to have, but still an amazing amount.”

Still, without MethaneSAT, researchers will no longer be able to continuously monitor methane emissions — dealing a blow to a program that emphasized the value of regular detection.

Without their own satellite, some of the scientists behind MethaneSAT are planning to use the algorithms they developed to help analyze data from other satellite missions, according to CFA researcher Xiong Liu.

And the MethaneSAT team is still gathering new data using older equipment. Before MethaneSAT launched, the project also used a similar technology, mounted on airplanes and called MethaneAIR, that zoomed in on emissions from specific regions. The instrument served as proof of concept for MethaneSAT and continues to provide valuable data in its own right.

“MethaneAIR was the precursor, and now I guess it’s also the post-cursor,” Jacob B.H. Bushey, a PhD student at Wofsy’s lab, said. “It continues to collect data even after MethaneSAT is no longer doing so.”

MethaneAIR first flew on a chartered Learjet in 2023, and more scans are underway.

“We conducted some test flights from the Colorado-Utah region just last week,” said Liu on Thursday. “Now we’re doing the science flights in Texas, covering the Delaware Basin.”

Though MethaneAIR can collect data from the same area multiple times a day at a high spatial resolution — unlike MethaneSAT, which collected data for many days on end but only once a day at a specific time — its scope is limited to Canada, the U.S., and possibly Mexico.

“MethaneAIR can only go where we can fly an airplane,” Wofsy said. “We’re very interested in the emissions in Uzbekistan and Russia and places like that. We haven’t been able to secure invitations to bring our airplane to those places, and we will not.”

Researchers still hope to send another satellite into space, but the costs to build and launch it present a major obstacle. For now, they hope the data from MethaneSAT’s 14-month run will help them prove the project is worth it.

“MethaneSAT 2, that’d be terrific,” said Chance, who is now retired.

But the future of the project may not be at Harvard. Wofsy said that after his retirement in several years, MethaneSAT “will potentially migrate from Harvard to somewhere else.”

“But that would just be changing from one university to another,” he said.

Correction: September 24, 2025

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Steven C. Wofsy planned to retire this year. In fact, he does not have immediate retirement plans.

—Staff writer Danielle J. Im can be reached at danielle.im@thecrimson.com.

— Staff writer Neeraja S. Kumar can be reached at neeraja.kumar@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @neerajasrikumar.