The US space agency said that it is the first time, that an orbiting NASA spacecraft has measured the methane emissions from a single, specific leaking facility on the Earth’s surface, by an instrument on board. Earlier we reported how space scientists who were monitoring the expansion at mission control in Houston, at Texas were very optimistic that this time they were going to be successful. Their optimism increased when they saw images on Nasa television showing the module slowly expanding after receiving three initial bursts of air. Daniel Huot, a Nasa spokesman said that Beam is continuing to slowly expand. Everything is going smoothly so far this morning, seeing good expansion both along the length and the diameter of BEAM. The pressure is well within what was expected.
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The observation— by the Hyperion spectrometer on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1)— is an important breakthrough that shows our ability to ultimately measure and monitor emissions of this potent greenhouse gas from space. One of the researchers David Thompson from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California said that this is the first time the methane emissions from a single facility have been observed from space.
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A research team detailed the observation, which occurred over Aliso Canyon, near Porter Ranch, California to a new paper accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. During the winter of 2015-16 the Hyperion instrument successfully detected the methane leak on three separate overpasses. The research was actually a part of an investigation of the huge scale accidental release of Aliso Canyon methane. The orbital observations from Hyperion were unswerving with airborne measurements which were made by NASA’s Airborne / Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) imager flying onboard the NASA ER-2 aircraft.
