A trio of Canadian satellites nicknamed Luca, Penny and Diako from GHGSat will launch into orbit with upgraded capabilities no earlier than Wednesday (May 25).
The GHGSat satellites – more officially called GHGSat-C3, -C4 and -C5 – will expand the company’s fleet of greenhouse gas monitors.
Their mission will launch on the SpaceX Transporter-5 mission (with numerous other small satellites) on a Falcon 9 rocket, leaving Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in coastal Florida to journey to a sun-synchronous orbit.
“These next three satellites for us will more than double the capacity of our system, and enable us to offer even higher quality of service for key customers,” GHGSat president Stephane Germain told SpaceQ, noting the higher resolution will be helpful “in areas of the world where there’s significant density of facilities and potential emission sources.”
GHGSat currently has one demonstrator and two commercial satellites in orbit. In December 2021, they announced procurement had begun for six new methane emission monitoring satellites (known as GHGSat-C6 through GHGSat-C11) and a carbon dioxide emission monitoring satellite, GHGSat-C12. These satellites should all be in orbit by the end of 2023.
The expanding fleet – even with these next three satellites launching on Transporter-5 – will increase both coverage and revisit times, while improving the accuracy of measurements of emissions over time, Germain said. The Montreal-based company aims to add seven more satellites in the near future to scale up, and hinted that as the fleet expands there will be more announcements coming.
“We have customers who, when they tasted something good, want more of it,” Germain said. “They keep setting the bar higher and we certainly are ready to support that demand; we are working at plans for a much larger constellation, but I’ll leave that as a teaser.”
The new satellites have slight changes to the infrastructure compared to the last three launched, but the basic technology is still the same. The satellites look for emissions using absorption technology, with a patented sensor from ABB Canada, to detect small industrial-scale emissions in pipelines or plants.
What’s changing, Germain said, is there will be faster processing available, along with more memory and a different frequency (X-band vs. S-band) for communications to allow faster data downloads. More ground stations will also bring information back to Earth quickly, he added.
“All of those things, really, were designed to alleviate a series of capacity bottlenecks that we knew existed in the system; there’s nothing new there,” he said. “We knew that as we grew, we would have to progressively alleviate these, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
The company also seeks to bring data back to Earth faster with a variety of algorithms designed to detect emissions automatically. For example, smoke can appear very different depending on conditions such as wind, topography and buildings.
After training an algorithm through machine learning to find subtle wisps of smoke or similar emissions, GHGSat produces concentration maps to highlight plumes (or concentrations of emissions) in each pixel of the image. As more data accumulates, the maps can then be repurposed to create trends over time to show whether emissions are consistently occurring.
Building out the fleet with Montreal-based ABB Canada is an essential move for GHGSat, as the company wants to expand Canadian capabilities as the satellite constellation grows. “It was for ease of business, for ease of technical exchange and for ease of financing,” Germain said.
Optics, he said, is something that “Canada is really good at,” which is why GHGSat wanted to use ABB Canada’s technology as a “key business strategy … we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel.”
Germain noted that satellite sensors are just one piece of GHGSat’s work, as the company has also deployed aircraft sensors to seek emissions. The aircraft allow for lower-cost launches with more flexibility for flights, although the detection threshold is lower.
“Customers really wanted them to clean up all the smaller leaks that we can find,” Germain said. The satellite monitoring, he said, is very useful “to catch stuff in between” scheduled aircraft flights.
Besides GHGSat, there are other payloads flying to space aboard this mission. A few highlights are below.
Spire Global
San Francisco-based Spire Global (a data and analytics company) has several satellites going into space, Spire said in a press release, as part of a multi-launch agreement with Exolaunch.
- HANCOM inSpace, which will send an “optical payload” aboard a Spire 6U satellite while also becoming the first-ever mission for a private South Korean company.
- Myriota, which will use three Spire satellites to send software-defined radios into space to expand its Internet of Things coverage.
- The United Kingdom Ministry of Defence’s Defence and Security Accelerator, which will use two Spire 3U satellites to demonstrate radio frequency signal detection in L-band, along with geolocation.
- Two “replenishment satellites” for Spire for data solutions including maritime, aviation and weather activity tracking via Global Navigation Satellite System sensors. These include weather products and radio occultation data.
Nanoracks
Houston-based Nanoracks announced a demonstration called Outpost Mars Demo-1 will launch on the flight. Demo-1 will “demonstrate on-orbit debris-free robotic metal cutting”, per Nanoracks, as part of a larger program seeking to repurpose the upper stages of rockets for longer space missions.
“Maxar will develop a new articulating robotic arm with a friction milling end-effector for this mission,” Nanoracks wrote in 2019, when the mission was first announced for a then-anticipated launch of Q4 2020 that was likely delayed by the pandemic.
“This friction milling will use high rotations per minute, melting our metal material in such a way that a cut is made – yet we anticipate avoiding generating a single piece of orbital debris,” Nanoracks added.
Other notable payloads
- Bronco Ember, which won $200,000 USD ($255,000 CAD) in a NASA Tech Leap Challenge, will fly on behalf of a student team at California State Polytechnic University to detect wildfires by “measuring heat wavelength and intensity on the ground,” the university stated.
- Capella Space will launch another synthetic aperture radar satellite called Capella 9 to join a growing fleet of Earth observing satellites.
- SelfieSat, a Norwegian student project, “will take the world’s first selfie from a satellite in space” after going to a higher orbit aboard a Momentus Vigoride transfer and service vehicle, the project webpage stated.
- A partial manifest of other satellites is available on the NASA Spaceflight forum.