Science

TANAGER-1

Commercial Hyperspectral Methane & CO2 Detection Satellite · Planet Labs / Carbon Mapper Coalition / NASA JPL

Two months after Tanager-1 reached orbit, it found a landfill in Karachi, Pakistan quietly leaking methane at a rate of 1,200 kilograms an hour — a plume stretching nearly two and a half miles, invisible to the naked eye, completely legal, and completely unmonitored until a satellite happened to look. Built by Planet Labs using an imaging spectrometer designed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Tanager-1 can pinpoint a methane or CO2 leak down to the individual facility or piece of equipment responsible — not just 'somewhere in this county,' but this specific valve, this specific landfill cell. Within its first year it had logged detections across six continents, including a cluster of super-emitters over Syrian oil facilities in a region almost nobody had been tracking, and had already contributed to its first confirmed real-world leak fix.