Tracking one of the Earth's leakyest greenhouse gases from space.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Dremalli.

2023 is on track to be the hottest year ever recorded.

In the climate crisis, carbon dioxide gets most of the headlines.

But molecule for molecule methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas.

It's odorless and colorless.

You could be standing within, you know, a few feet of a massive methane plume and not

know it was there.

That's Riley Durin, CEO of CarbonMapper, a nonprofit that tracks greenhouse gas emissions.

While CO2 can linger in the atmosphere for decades, methane lasts more like seven to

12 years.

And because it's so potent, there's potential to quickly fix the leaks and have an immediate

climate benefit.

That's if you can find them.

CarbonMapper does that now by flying planes with imaging spectrometers over oil and gas

hubs in other spots where leaks can cluster.

But to scale things up, it's also working with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena

California on an instrument that can detect leaks from space.

On a recent visit, I spoke with JPL senior research scientist Rob Green just outside the

clean room where the instruments been developed.

That is a vacuum chamber where we can open it, put an instrument in there and then pull

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