GHGSat specialises in remote sensing, quantification, and facility attribution of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from industrial sources around the world. The mission is specifically designed for identifying and measuring methane and carbon dioxide emissions from point sources as small as individual oil and gas wells.

Each satellite is equipped with a wide-angle Fabry-Perot (WAF-P) imaging spectrometer, designed to measure the vertical column abundances of greenhouse gases. With this high-resolution spectrometer, GHGSat is able to detect emissions as small as 100 kg/hr and trace the source to a 25-metre area.

GHGSat launched its first satellite, GHGSat-D (Claire) in 2016. Since then, GHGSat has steadily launched new satellites, including one with a CO2 instrument in 2023, to enable global methane monitoring at scale, with the capability to revisit industrial sites on a daily basis.

As of June 2025, the GHGSat constellation consists of 13 satellites, the largest fleet dedicated to greenhouse gases in the world. GHGSat continues to rapidly expand its constellation, with plans to near-double its fleet in the coming years. In 2024 alone, GHGSat satellites observed more than 4 million industrial facilities across 110 countries, detecting more than 20,000 emissions, equivalent to 534 MTCO2e.

GHGSat's current focus is the detection of methane emissions from anthropogenic sources onshore and offshore (from industrial sites including oil & gas, mining, waste management, and agricultural facilities) to provide actionable insights that support carbon-intensive industries to mitigate their emissions, and inform climate and environmental scientific modelling with accurate data. With GHGSat's high resolution, global coverage, and daily revisit frequency, it is possible to identify fugitive emissions and track ongoing emissions, supporting industry, academia, and governments to make data-driven operational and policy decisions.

The data from GHGSat's satellite constellation is complemented by aircraft-based methane measurements (DATA.AIR), providing even lower detection thresholds, for targeted campaigns in areas with a high-density of sites. Additionally, GHGSat uses a “tip and cue” approach to collaborate with Sentinel-5P and Sentinel-2 that provides increased temporal coverage for emissions monitoring, supports informed tasking of the GHGSat constellation, and enables the most accurate pinpointing of an emission’s source.

Because methane has a warming effect roughly 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, reducing its levels in the atmosphere can have a swift impact on the climate. In the near-term, every ton of methane reduced will be equivalent to over 100 tons of carbon dioxide reduced over the subsequent five years.

See an overview of the GHGSat mission in this infographic:

GHGSat's satellites are equipped with a wide-angle Fabry-Perot imaging spectrometer designed to measure the vertical column abundances of greenhouse gases. GHGSat-D is capable of measuring both methane and carbon dioxide, while GHGSat's commercial fleet (GHGSat-Cx) is currently optimised for methane, with plans for a carbon dioxide dedicated satellite in 2023. The satellites are three-axis stabilised and are not equipped with a propulsion system. Despite not having a propulsion system, GHGSat is commited to ensuring a safe and sustainable orbital environment and is able to perform collision avoidance maneuvers with the use of differential drag.

GHGSat offers satellite imagery and data for measuring methane emissions from targeted industrial facilities anywhere in the world. This imagery and data are collected using a hyperspectral imaging spectrometer operating in a narrow band of the short-wave infrared (SWIR) region of the electromagnetic spectrum. This sensor has both (i) very high spatial resolution (~25 m), and (ii) very high spectral resolution (~0.3 nm), to enable high-precision measurement of vertical column densities of methane in several hundred thousand pixels within the instrument field-of-view. GHGSat's sensor is designed to provide a measurement of the excess methane concentration due to local sources with respect to the surrounding background within a given 12 km x 12 km scene.

The GHGSat constellation of satellites operates in sun-synchronous Low Earth Orbit (LEO) with a period of 95 minutes at altitudes around 500 km. The sun-synchronous orbit of each satellite ensures that observations are collected during daylight (a requirement given that measurements are based on absorbed reflected sunlight) at a consistent time of day for each site.

The constellation is tasked on a daily basis to ensure that the target planning is based on the most recent predicted cloud coverage data. GHGSat's scheduling algorithm prioritizes which sites should be observed based on probability of good weather, historical emission analytics for the site, and emission risk analysis derived from other emission-sensing systems such as Sentinel-5P and Sentinel-2. Targeting is optimized by the algorithm across the constellation to maximize coverage and site revisit.

• GHGSat microsatellite constellation on eoPortal*
• GHGSat-D on eoPortal*
• GHGSat Website*

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