When his phone rang, Berrien Moore III, the dean of the College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, was fumbling with his bow tie, preparing for a formal ceremony honoring a colleague. He glanced down at the number and recognized it asheadquarters. This was a bad sign, he thought. In Moore’s experience, bureaucrats never called after hours with good news.
There are different ways to tackle these problems. MethaneSAT, a satellite being developed by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, aimed to focus exclusively on methane, identifying and characterizing sources of emissions around the world. Moore’s project, GeoCarb, would provide researchers with a continuously updated map of greenhouse gases in the Western Hemisphere, helping them answer important questions about the carbon cycle more generally.
bacteria break it down, releasing its stored carbon as carbon dioxide. Ideally, an adjacent tree takes in the newly liberated COThe carbon cycle goes on even in places that are oxygen-deprived. Sometimes, a tree falls into a marsh, or other similar environment; beneath the surface or underwater, there isn’t enough oxygen for aerobic bacteria to do the work of decomposition.
Hamburg felt that E.D.F. had exhausted the practical possibilities for measuring methane on Earth. The only option left was space. He asked Wofsy a series of hypothetical questions: If E.D.F. could somehow get something into space, what would that spacecraft have to do in order to replicate the Barnett Shale study for the whole world? What measurements would it need to make to identify the locations and quantity of emissions, and to track them through time? If E.D.F.
—as well as governments, academic institutions, space agencies, and other organizations—hire GHGSat to study their facilities. By mapping methane flows, MethaneSAT has the potential to identify specific sources of methane, such as oil wells and farms, almost anywhere in the world. Ball, like Ingersoll, was hesitant about taking on the MethaneSAT project. “The hard part—the barrier—was we had never done business with an N.G.O., so they didn’t have guaranteed funding,” Alberto Conti, Ball’s vice-president and general manager for civil space, recalled. “We are not a huge company, so there is an opportunity cost. And it was a hard sell because the instrument is very difficult to make, and we want to make some money at the end.