A satellite designed to monitor human-made methane emissions has gone missing in space.
Dubbed MethaneSAT, the $88 million spacecraft was launched into orbit aboard a SpaceX rocket in March 2024 and was expected to collect data on the potent greenhouse gas for at least five years.
But for the past two weeks, the satellite's operators, the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, have been unable to establish contact.
Now, in a final blow, mission control says that MethaneSAT has lost power, crushing almost all hope of bringing it back online.
"It is likely not recoverable," the EDF said in a statement Tuesday.
The cause, at this time, isn't known, and an investigation into why communications were lost is ongoing.
It's an agonizing loss, especially as the mission — which was backed by Google and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — had proven that its advanced spectrometer instruments could pick out emissions from space and trace them back to their source with remarkable precision.
The just under a year's worth of data it managed to collect was "magnificent," Steven Hamburg, chief scientist at the EDF, told the New York Times.
"We set out in this first year to demonstrate what was possible, that we could think about direct measurement of greenhouse gases in a way that we had never been able to do before," Hamburg added. "And I think we demonstrated that."
Methane traps 28 times more heat than carbon dioxide and is considered to be the second biggest contributor to global warming.
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