Methane-monitoring satellite MethaneSAT has lost power and communications, the team behind the mission said in an update on 1 July.
The MethaneSAT mission operations team lost contact with MethaneSAT on 20 June, and the team learned on 1 July that the satellite lost power and is likely not recoverable. The team is investigating the loss of communication.
A representative for MethaneSAT said that, at this point, there isn’t enough information to determine why communication was lost. The satellite was functioning properly when it passed over a downlink station in Svalbard, Norway, at 01:44 UTC on 20 June, but the team was unable to establish contact for the next pass over Antarctica at 2:40 UTC later that day.
“We are still very much in the early stages of sorting out what happened with the satellite. As of now, we simply don’t have enough information to determine why we lost communications,” the representative said. “What took place in between is unclear. Our engineering team worked hard to restore the connection, to no avail.”
MethaneSAT is a nonprofit and a subsidiary of the Environmental Defense Fund, supported by a number of donors including the government of New Zealand and the Bezos Earth Fund.
While the satellite is no longer functional, MethaneSAT said it will work to make use of the data the satellite collected to continue the work to cut methane emissions. MethaneSAT said it plans to release additional scenes of global oil and gas production region-scale emissions.