Spire Global, Inc., provider of space-based data, analytics and space services, announced a Space Services agreement with GHGSat, a leader in high-resolution methane monitoring from space, to expand its satellite constellation for greenhouse gas emissions monitoring. Under the agreement, Spire will launch three 16U satellites in 2023 that will carry GHGSat’s payload and provide the company with Spire’s robust, scalable, and simple-to-integrate API to effortlessly receive its data and operate its payloads.
Spire’s more than 350 years of space heritage will help GHGSat, which currently operates six small satellites, meet growing demand for its business of providing timely, accurate measurements of methane emissions from industrial sites worldwide. The data collected by its payload is used to monitor emissions from carbon-intensive industries such as oil and gas, coal mining, waste management and agriculture. GHGSat’s services are critical to detect methane leaks, quantify emissions inventories, support mitigation strategies, and help operators achieve their net-zero targets. Governments, research institutes and international organizations such as UNEP’s International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO) also require transparent and accurate emissions data to better understand the industrial carbon footprint and advise on the most productive mitigation actions to fight climate change today.
“Monitoring greenhouse gas emissions to help fight climate change is a perfect example of how data from space can provide insights into the biggest challenges facing humanity,” said Joel Spark, Co-Founder and General Manager, Space Services, Spire. “We’re proud that GHGSat chose to leverage Spire’s proven space platform, end-to-end manufacturing facility, global ground station network and mission operations system to efficiently scale its constellation. Taking the complexity out of space so that great companies like GHGSat can focus on their core mission and solve global problems is exactly why we developed our Space Services offering.”
Spire Space Services has a subscription model that eliminates the upfront costs of building and maintaining infrastructure in space. Commercial and government organizations can deploy and operate a constellation of satellites, a hosted payload, or a software application in space with Spire’s established space, ground, and web infrastructure. Spire handles the end-to-end management, from manufacturing to launch to satellite operations, and the customer operates the system through a web API.
“Hosting GHGSat payloads on Spire satellites allows us to focus on monitoring rather than on satellite manufacturing and operations,” said Stephane Germain, CEO of GHGSat. “Having successfully completed and launched our initial satellite assets, GHGSat plans to add hosted payload solutions to complement our full satellite solutions to accelerate monitoring. We expect to seamlessly manage these three hosted payloads as part of our growing constellation of satellites and payloads in orbit, providing more facility-level emissions measurements for our customers at the lowest detection threshold available in the world today.”