NASA JPL hopes to extend vision of pollution monitoring satellite

It was nearly 10 years ago when Andrew Thorpe received a message from a crew flying overhead in a small plane: They A new methane hot spot was observed,

Thorpe was driving over winding dirt and mountain roads in a heavy rental SUV near the Four Corners region of the southwestern US. When he arrived at the location broadcast from the plane, he pulled out a thermal camera to scan the smoke. Sure enough, methane was venting out of the ground, possibly from a pipeline leak.

He found a marker in the desert with a gas company’s phone number on it, so he called them. “The most confused person on the other end of the phone was me,” Thorpe said. “I was trying to explain to him why I was calling, but this was many years ago when there wasn’t really any technology that could do that.”

Over the past few years, this work has earned Thorpe some unwanted attention. “I did some driving surveys in California … a hired policeman was very suspicious of me and tried to intimidate me,” Thorpe said. “If you put a thermal camera on a public road and point it at a tank across a fence, people will panic. Some oil and gas workers have made fun of me, but that’s normal.”

Today, Thorpe is part of a group that leads NASA’s greenhouse gas monitoring. Jet Propulsion Laboratory Over 40 Years in La Cañada Flintridge Microdevices Laboratory at JPL has developed special instruments to measure methane and carbon dioxide with extreme precision.

Instruments called spectrometers detect gases based on which colors of sunlight they absorb. Earlier this year, a team of researchers from JPL, Caltech, and research nonprofit Carnegie Science found that gases are a colorless, opaque colorless substance that can be absorbed by human eyes. Selected as a finalist A NASA award has been sought to put this technology into orbit.

JPL technicians work on an Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer, or AVIRIS, which will be mounted on airplanes to search for methane and other greenhouse gases.

(Myang J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

If selected for the satellite mission, the team’s carbon probe, called Carbon-I, would launch in the early 2030s. Over the course of three years, Carbon-I will continuously map greenhouse gas emissions around the world and take daily snapshots of areas of interest, helping scientists identify sources of climate pollution, such as power plants, pipeline leaks, farms and landfills.

While there are already a number of satellites monitoring these gases, Carbon-Eye’s resolution is unprecedented and will eliminate any guesswork in determining where the gas was emitted. “This can no longer be ruled out — once we see a plume, there is no other possible source,” said Christian Frankenberg, Carbon-Eye co-principal investigator and professor of environmental science and engineering at Caltech.

Caltech professor Christian Frankenberg, co-principal investigator of the proposed space-based carbon-I emissions-monitoring system, looks at the AVIRIS monitor under construction at the JPL laboratory.

(Myang J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

Carbon-I’s top-of-the-line, 100-foot resolution is “very high resolution from space. It’s an incredible resolution,” said Debra Wunch, a professor at the University of Toronto who studies Earth’s carbon cycle and is not involved in the Carbon-I proposal. “It will be able to give us a lot more information about the source of emissions. … It will be a revolutionary step. You’ll be able to see even different stacks, different parts of a landfill.”

Historically, monitoring greenhouse gas emissions from individual emitters has been challenging – both carbon dioxide and methane are colorless and odorless. So scientists often have to rely on combining values ​​reported by companies and research estimates. For example, to estimate the amount of methane produced by cows, scientists must determine how much methane a cow emits and multiply it by the total number of cows on Earth.

“If you look at international policies … currently they are all based on these bottom-up inventories,” said Anna Michalak, co-principal investigator of Carbon-i and founding director of the Carnegie Climate and Resilience Hub at Carnegie Science. “We need to get to a point where … we actually have an independent way to track emissions.”

Carbon-I’s solution will give scientists new access to the atmosphere of the tropics, where clouds currently obscure most forms of satellite monitoring. “That’s their weakness,” Frankenberg said.

Since tropical and subtropical forests absorb about a quarter of the CO2 Humanity creates Accurate data from this region of the world is desperately needed to control carbon emissions on Earth from burning fossil fuels.

Low-resolution satellites currently orbiting Earth cannot see through small gaps in cloud coverage. They see only a blurry average of cloudy and clear spots in the sky for each pixel. Carbon-I, which has a pixel area of ​​about 50 times smaller than most other satellites, can see the clear spots and take measurements through them. April 2024 paperFrankenberg, Michalak and their colleagues estimate that Carbon-I will be 10 to 100 times more capable of seeing through clouds in the tropics than its predecessors.

Carbon-Eye “is going to see things where people have no idea what’s going on,” said Thorpe, who has carried over from his graduate school days putting thermal cameras on gas leaks and now works as a research technologist with the Microdevices Laboratory. “It’s going to open up a whole new area of ​​science.”

JPL’s airborne greenhouse gas-monitoring program is decades old, but the field of space monitoring is still fairly new. In early 2016, NASA Headquarters approached the JPL team. There was a large-scale investigation underway. Explosion at Aliso Canyon gas storage facility A spacecraft near Porter Ranch asked NASA to investigate.

The team flew over the site for three days over the course of a month in a version of a 1960s spy plane while the Southern California Gas Company struggled to contain the blowout. At the same time, NASA’s Goddard Flight Center in Maryland pointed the NASA Earth Observing Spacecraft’s Hyperion spectrometer toward the leak.

Hyperion was designed to observe the Earth’s surface and filter out the noise from the atmosphere. Now, they were trying to observe the atmosphere and filter out the surface, and first timeScientists observed a man-made point source of methane from orbit.

“The result from Hyperion was very noisy, but you could still see the plume,” Thorpe said. “It was really a proof of concept that we could do this from space.”

Even though Carbon-I launches, that doesn’t mean the team will stop putting instruments on planes. From the plane, the team is able to monitor areas of interest in even clearer resolution and for several days continuously. Right now, a slimmer, improved version of the spectrometer that looked at the Four Corners leak and the Aliso Canyon blowout is flying several missions to monitor emissions from offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

The twin-engine King Air aircraft used by JPL to conduct greenhouse gas-monitoring flights in its hangar at Hollywood Burbank Airport.

(Noah Hagerty/Los Angeles Times)

The aircraft also give the mission team the opportunity to try out new and improved spectrometers. “You can fix them and upgrade them,” says JPL engineer Michael Eastwood, who has worked with spectrometers for more than three decades and flies with them regularly. “You can take more risk, whereas spacecraft that have really mature, really well-known, high reliability requirements — we’re not constrained in that way.”

The aircrew is also nimble. Typically, two crew members in the second row of a King Air twin-propeller plane look at a stack of laptops and instruments with enough buttons to compete with the plane’s cockpit. On the screen, they can see real-time GPS data and spectrometer results and coordinate flight plans with the pilots. The spectrometer — called AVIRISAirborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer) – Seated in the third row, looking down through a window in the floor.

The NASA program for which Carbon-I was selected as a finalist aims to fund space-based Earth science that will benefit society. The team was awarded $5 million to improve its project proposal before NASA’s final review in 2025. There are three other finalists, and two will be selected for launch.

This two-step process for selecting missions is new to NASA’s Earth science programs and requires JPL to compete with the rest of the scientific community, independent of its collaboration with the space agency.

“If we’re talking about grocery money, ($5 million) sounds like a lot of money, but it’s actually a bargain,” Michalak said. “If you think about the fact that you’re spending $300 million on a mission, spending 1.5% of that to make sure it’s going to be great and successful is a very smart move.”

In the meantime, the Carbon-I team is focused on showing NASA that it has the technical know-how to complete the project on time and within budget.

“I think all four missions in the current phase are absolutely worthwhile scientific missions, and a 50% chance for a satellite mission is not bad,” Michalak said.