An $88 million methane-tracking satellite that attracted funding from the likes of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the government of New Zealand is no longer operating.
Ground crews lost contact June 20 with MethaneSAT, which was launched in March 2024, the Environmental Defense Fund announced Tuesday. Officials said they recently learned that the satellite lost power and was “likely not recoverable.”
EDF said MethaneSAT was the first satellite developed by an environmental nonprofit, and the group sought to publicly distribute the methane data collected by the project. EDF began publishing some of that data last year and had partnered with Google to create a massive, global map of methane emissions from oil and gas sites.
“While this is difficult news, it is not the end of the overall MethaneSAT effort, or of our work to slash methane emissions,” EDF officials wrote in a statement.
