Latest Insights

Road to Launch: The Carbon Mapper Coalition achieves key satellite milestones
The instrument that will go on the Tanager-1 satellite was transferred from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to Planet Labs PBC. This marks an exciting achievement in the development of the first of two satellites being developed and deployed through a first-of-its-kind public-private Coalition led by Carbon Mapper.
Methane Point Sources — What They Are and Why They Matter
This post is part of Carbon Mapper’s Methane Remote Monitoring Education Series, which intends to help build a base knowledge of important topics in the methane monitoring space and demystify key concepts that are important to Carbon Mapper’s mission. To recommend a...
NEW: Global Data and Enhanced Functionality Available on the Carbon Mapper Data Portal
This week, Carbon Mapper released exciting enhancements to the Carbon Mapper Data Portal which now features new data on global sources of methane plus improved functionality to make this data more accessible and actionable. We invite you to visit the portal to explore...
Methane Matters: A Complex but Critical Greenhouse Gas
This post is the first of Carbon Mapper’s Methane Remote Monitoring Education Series, which intends to demystify key concepts and topics about methane and what it takes to measure and monitor this important greenhouse gas. To recommend a future topic, contact us here....
See Our Data
The Carbon Mapper program is built upon the ongoing work of our current science and research team. Since 2016, our experts and our collaborators at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and Arizona State University have used aircraft equipped with prototype versions of the Carbon Mapper satellite instruments along with other observing systems and data sets to assess methane emissions in representative regions and economic sectors across the U.S.
Our Plan
Carbon Mapper has three main objectives:
Help accelerate mitigation of methane super-emitters

Independently verify power plant CO2 emissions globally

Deliver 25+ other hyperspectral indicators for carbon and ecosystem management

To meet these objectives, we will deploy a constellation of satellites and aircraft equipped with high performance visible/infrared imaging spectrometers with the ability to identify, quantify and attribute global methane and CO2 point-source emissions at the scale of individual facilities and equipment.
The methane and CO2 data will be made freely available via Carbon Mapper’s global data portal to ensure maximum transparency. To promote trust and broader adoption, the State of California will maintain its own data portal and will independently review, ground-truth and validate the Carbon Mapper data while advancing new mitigation strategies and working to expand those strategies through its partners in other jurisdictions across the U.S. and globally. Additionally, Carbon Mapper will maximize the use of the data by supporting an ongoing research program and by conducting outreach and stakeholder engagement to ensure policy relevance.
Urgency
As a society, we have less than 10 years to meet critical milestones in greenhouse gas emission reductions (particularly methane) and improved conservation of ecosystems, biodiversity, and other natural resources. There’s still time to act but meeting these ambitious targets requires an all-hands-on-deck mobilization on many fronts without delay. Carbon Mapper’s goals include contributing to the growing community of organizations working to offer science-based guidance to decision makers at all levels of society.
Progress and Next Steps
Carbon Mapper is deploying a multi-scale emissions monitoring system from air and space. We’re currently building two demonstration satellites that will launch in early 2023 and plan to expand to a fully operational constellation of many satellites at a future date. The latter will provide daily to weekly sampling of high priority regions globally. We initiated an effort with Teledyne Imaging Systems two years ago to develop the critical focal plane arrays that form the heart of our imaging spectrometer instrument. The first two assemblies were delivered in January 2021 and our first major program design review is scheduled for late summer. Meanwhile, since the climate clock is ticking, we’re working to help accelerate near-term mitigation action through expanded surveys of key regions in North America using our remote-sensing aircraft, supporting efforts by the US Climate Alliance, state agencies, and other partners.