In this insightful episode, we reconnect with Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher, principal scientist at New Zealand’s National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research and science leader for the groundbreaking MethaneSAT project. We explore the journey of New Zealand’s first internationally-partnered space mission, designed to measure greenhouse gases and monitor agricultural emissions from space—a revolutionary approach to combating climate change.
Sara shares the mission’s recent successes, the global potential of satellite data to address methane emissions, and inspiring reflections on the importance of science and courage in tackling climate challenges. This conversation exemplifies World Space Week’s focus on how space technology fosters human progress.
[Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher] It’s lovely to see you again. I’m [Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher]. I am a principal scientist at the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and I am the science leader for the methane New Zealand’s MethaneSAT science project, which is the first international space mission that the New Zealand government has officially participated in.
[Hari Mogoșanu] So Sara, we spoke a few years back before we had any mission here in New Zealand, and we were very excited, because when we did the interview, it was also for the World Space Week, and so would be really interesting to see what happened in between, especially because this year, we’re looking at the role of all these [space] technologies and everything that they do good for us [to help with climate change]. So can you please tell us everything about the mission? It’s very, very exciting to talk to you again.
[Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher] All right. Well, noting that’s quite a unique satellite mission in that it’s the first satellite designed to measure greenhouse gasses that has been launched primarily by funding from charitable donations. So it’s being led by the Environmental Defense Fund, and then the New Zealand government is partnering in that mission. Our role as a New Zealand science team is to develop the capability of the satellite to quantify and map agricultural emissions all around the world, which is the first time anyone will have ever tried to look at diffuse agricultural emissions from space. So that’s pretty exciting. The most exciting news for me this year [2024] is that the satellite actually launched. So when you’re working on one of these satellite missions, the satellite launch is like Christmas Day, right? And so you’re doing all of the work of preparing for the satellite, getting all of your modeling infrastructure in place, testing everything, testing everything. And then once the satellite is finally launched, you get to start to open your presence and the presence of the data. So we’ve had the first few targets collected from New Zealand. It takes quite a bit of time after one of these satellites launches to do all of the testing and calibration and shakedown, but we just had the first few targets collected. We got the data the week of my birthday, which was the best birthday present I ever had in my life. We’re just starting to be able to analyze them. And we also had a big ground based field campaign during the period when those satellite data were collected. And so we did lots of ground based remote sensing to validate the satellite. We did aircraft measurements, and we brought together a lot of little different types of data so that we’d be able to quantify the methane emissions from the target region in three different ways? So you want to be able to quantify agricultural emissions for the first time from space, and , you need to be able to really show you’ve done it, so we’ll be able to quantify those emissions in that region in three different ways, so that we can give confidence to other people around the world who might want to use this data to look at their own agricultural emissions.
[Hari Mogoșanu] Wow! This is brilliant. So tell us about space and climate change. How does space and especially in your role, how does it help us here on Earth to understand climate change?
[Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher] Hmm, that’s a big topic, right? The big opportunities with space and climate change are really just the ability to observe of map the Earth, with a global focus that is very hard and expensive to do. With ground based measurements alone, we’re never going to be able to do it just from space. But, being able to map what’s going on all over the world with satellite observations and to be able to act at the speed that we need to be able to act to support emissions reductions, in the right now, which is when we need to be able to do them. So if you think about the other part, the main part of the MethaneSAT Mission is detecting leaks of methane from oil and gas. And these are usually happening by accident. They’re they’re not intentional emissions. They’re happening because there’s a million zillion miles of pipeline transporting natural gas, and some of it is leaking. And so these types of satellites are good for identifying just where those leaks are quickly. So in that many, many miles of pipeline so that people can go out and fix them, and that’s a climate solution for which, which has, very low and, in fact, sometimes negative economic cost. So these are examples of sort of low hanging fruit actions we could take to get started. It’s not going to get this all the way, right. You can’t do it with methane alone. We must tackle CO2 if you want to have. If there’s no pathway to climate stabilization that does not involve reaching that zero carbon emissions globally. But these are the things we can do quickly to get started on climate action.
[Hari Mogoșanu] So you have to have a combination of the two. However, using space has opened up our understanding of how our planet functions and what’s up there. And as you were saying, you can actually keep an eye on things that may happen by accident or maybe not, but you can police them better. You can see them better from space.
[Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher] Well, you can track from space what emissions are at national scales too. So what we do know from atmospheric measurements, both on the ground and from space, is that if you add up all of the emissions that countries are reporting in their national inventory reporting under the Paris Climate Agreement, and you compare it with how carbon dioxide and methane are changing in the atmosphere, those numbers don’t quite add up, and it’s actually the atmospheric change in these greenhouse gasses that matters for climate. And so satellites are starting to open up the ability to identify where the problems are in these inventories, so we can make them better, and so that we can see and know that our climate actions that we’re promising to do, are actually making the difference we expect them to make. Wow, yeah, you can’t do little countries from space yet, although some of someone, an amazing scientist in my group, has a partnership with JPL to work on that, but the big countries now you can track them with satellite data.
[Hari Mogoșanu] So you talked about your team, and World Space Week is a celebration of the human betterment that we get from space technology, and space and climate change is a very, very important topic. If you could tell us a little bit about your team and what they do, and what you do at your job, when you come to work, and if someone wants to be you when they grow up, what would they have to study?
[Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher] Well, I studied several different things. I did my degree in chemistry, and I did my PhD in physical chemistry, which is sort of the more physics related aspect of chemistry. But people come to climate science from everywhere, right? Because these are problems where they involve understanding the carbon cycle or the methane cycle, means you have to understand, what does the terrestrial biosphere do? What was the atmosphere doing? What does the chemistry in the atmosphere do? What do the oceans do? What does ice do? You need to understand all of these different things. So it’s quite a good field if you’re someone who likes learning about many different things, and people come to it from all over. So people come to it from chemistry, from biology, from physics, all of those things. I would say, if you want to advance in climate science, just put whatever you’re good at and you love together with climate science and do it so so hard, you become amazing at it, and that’s the way to get a good career in climate science, or, in climate in general. It takes kind of every lots of people with lots of different skills, but thinking more broadly, who’s on my team, I often feel like my single biggest talent is being able to convince lots of people who are smart and creative and amazing to work with me, and so I have a pretty amazing team, both here in New Zealand and all around the world.
[Hari Mogoșanu] So for example, you are one of those people who actually use space to understand climate change and combat it. So what do you do for your daily job when you come to work? What kind of stuff do you do? – explain please for a layperson like me?
[Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher] So like you’re asking, what’s the day in life look like? That’s complicated, because it’s different every single day, right? How amazing, that’s the perfect job. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s also complicated, because I’m in a stage in my career where a lot of my work is mentoring people and supporting people and less of it is actually like writing code. So I started my career as a modeler. My PhD project was about using ground based atmospheric measurements of methane around the world and isotopes to work out what the global methane site cycle was doing.And you combine that with atmospheric models. So that was my PhD work. But I’ve done lots of different things, and I would say my job is really diverse, so it’s kind of hard to characterize it exactly as my daily life would be. Thinking more broadly about my team, I have people who are experts in atmospheric transport modeling, and where that’s really important is what the satellite is able to map – methane concentrations, but what you actually need for policy is the emissions. And so the atmospheric transport modeling is how you backtrack to figure out what the emissions were based on a map of the concentrations of methane in the atmosphere. And then, the ground based validation is really at the heart of being able to do good satellite measurements. And so we have lots of people who work on atmospheric measurements for that type of validation on the team. So we have people who do ground based remote sensing, where you look up at the satellite in the same way that the satellite looks down at the Earth, and then you’re able to better. You’re able to calibrate the satellite and understand what’s going on in the whole air column. We have people who do aircraft measurements of methane, so that you can look at what the profiles look like in the atmosphere. We have people who work on developing the algorithms you use to calculate the concentrations from what methane sat actually measures which are spectra. So this is now a whole host of different people. And then we have amazing, amazing partners at Harvard University, who are leading the development of all of the fossil fuel work, which we work with, really closely, working on all of those kinds of things. And at EDF. And then, of course, , in the back, in the background, are heroic engineers who build a satellite, who built the Mission Operations Control Systems – Rocket Lab has done that, and it’s based at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and all of those things that actually make the satellite run. Like I’m not the person who makes the satellite, builds the satellite, or makes it work. I’m the person who uses the data to help support people. And I think the other big aspect of this sort of thing, if you’d like to not just do science for science, but actually to support change. Is the connection with people who want to reduce emissions and the policy community and people who want to reduce their emissions and take climate action, and that’s particularly important for our mission as a New Zealand team, which is the agricultural mission, because agriculture is a little different from fossil fuels. And if you’re going to look to quantify agricultural emissions, and especially if a lot of the places where you’re going to quantify it, are in the developing world, you need to link that information with pathways and support for how people can improve those emissions. Otherwise, it’s quite problematic, actually. So it’s, , this effort is really linked to Environmental Defense Fund and to aid programs that can potentially support communities to reduce their emissions from agriculture
[Hari Mogoșanu] and definitely, space plays this enormous role because it just gives us that bird eye view on all the situations and helps us connect the dots.
[Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher] Yeah, exactly. And there are a lot of places where we have really great ground based networks where we can monitor those things, but this is going to help us so much in those places where it’s always going to be expensive and hard and impractical to do that. MethaneSAT is not the only greenhouse gas observing satellites. It has special properties, but thinking about what all of the different greenhouse gas satellites do broadly and how they can contribute a lot of it is really about being able to observe how the Earth is responding in places where it’s just never really going to be practical or affordable, to be able to have a dense ground based network.
[Hari Mogoșanu] Absolutely, this is such an interesting stream of work that you’re doing and thinking back from New Zealand, not having that kind of capability, only like a decade ago, now doing all this work. Can you tell me a little bit about how it was to be part of this work, to put these things out there in space and to create the network? How hard was it?
[Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher] It was incredible. I mean, all of the things worth doing are hard, right? In science, the easy ones are already done, so it was hard, but I did have some advantages that gave me a bit of a boost. One is that this is New Zealand’s first official science satellite mission that we’re partnering in, but we have actually quite a long history of engagement in remote sensing of greenhouse gasses. So New Zealand has one of the two founding TCCON sites, which is a global network of sites that provide ground based verification for every satellite in the sky that measures greenhouse gasses. So it has one of the first, the two founding of these TCCON sites. And so we’ve really been working with the satellite community for quite some time, even if this is our first space mission, and we have very advanced modeling capability for the type of modeling you need to be able to do to quantify emissions from space. So we had these great advantages, but it’s a big learning, right? It’s a job for people who love big challenges and learning lots of new things very quickly
[Hari Mogoșanu] and probably not to be scared about the future as much, and maybe trust a bit more in science.
I was reading the other day that there’s a lot of climate anxiety from a lot of the young people, maybe because they don’t have enough data, they don’t understand what it means, and everybody’s kind of like scared, in the face of climate change, but sometimes people just get depressed and they don’t want to do anything about it. And I think one of the most important things that we can do as grown ups, right is to actually spread the word that everybody can do something about it. I have the strong belief that science education and understanding how the universe works [can help] and putting your head out there and trying to come up with new solutions for something that we’ve never actually faced before, right? Because climate change is this big, scary thing, but I think, personally, and I’m an optimist, I think we can do it. I think we can solve the world’s problems if we all learn a little bit of science and put our heads there and all work together. And I just wanted to hear your thoughts about this trend that we have, and what you think we could do to maybe tell everybody that all these problems – that are there, it’s worth fighting for.
[Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher] Yeah, I really relate to what you’re saying. I mean, even when I was just starting as a PhD student and really learning how serious these problems were, and this was now quite some time ago. It seemed overwhelming, and I became very depressed about it, and I went and had a chat with my grandmother, who grew up in the depression in the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma. Which was — if you’re not from America, that is probably the biggest natural disaster, human made natural disaster, in America of that century. So she grew up in the depression and the Dust Bowl, and I told her about this and how I was worried we just never got on top of it. And she… laughed. That’s what she did. And she said, , I know what it feels like to be where you are, because I grew up in these incredibly hard times. And then, , your grandfather fought in World War Two, and we didn’t know if we were going to win. We did not know if we were going to make it. And it seemed like this incredible threat, especially at the beginning, when so much of America’s military power was destroyed, really all in one go. It seemed like this impossible thing to overcome, but what? Everyone pulled together, and everyone did their bit, and we did it, right? And that’s how life is. There are going to be times when it seems impossible and it’s hard, and you just have to have the courage to act, even if you don’t know what the outcome will be, and I don’t know what the outcome will be on climate change. We’ve been working on it for a long time. I don’t know what the outcome will be, but you have to have the courage to act and to think about, what can my contribution to this problem be? And it’s when everyone has the courage to act that we can overcome these problems that seem impossible, right? And so that’s how I would explain it to young people. I can’t promise you that we’re going to fix this perfectly. In fact, I can’t know that you will experience climate change impacts in your lifetime, because you are experiencing them right now. It used to be that you needed sophisticated equipment to know that climate change was happening, but now all you really need is your eyes and your lived experience on this earth to know that climate change is happening, but it’s when you have the courage to act that you have the ability to create a better world.
[Hari Mogoșanu] Wow. This is very, very beautiful. I always ask this question, but I can ask you this question, kind of like in two parts, the part of Sara, who was the one who went and asked her grandmother about the future, and the Sara now, who went and learned and has a PhD and runs an amazing program and and does a lot of science. So what does Sara today think about the future of humankind?
[Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher] I still fundamentally believe in the future of humankind, right? I am a Star Trek person, not a Star Wars person. I think the future will be better, right? And, and, , I can’t be certain of it, but, and because people can be terrible, but, whenever the bad times come, if you really look around, there are always people who are doing everything, doing amazing things to make the world better. And that’s my view, is that things might not matter how difficult things look, just find the people who are working to make things better, and think about how you can contribute to them.
[Hari Mogoșanu] Wow. Thank you so much for First of all, for making time to talk to us, and for your absolutely insightful and wonderful, wonderful thoughts. And thank you for sharing this with our worldwide audience here at the World Space Week. And I wish you a very Happy World Space Week, and I hope to hear from you soon.
[Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher] Oh, thank you. It was lovely talking to you again.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai and edited for clarity
THE WORLD SPACE WEEK ASSOCIATION PODCAST SERIES
A series of conversations with visionary thinkers and doers, sharing their unique insights and aspirations for the future of humanity beyond Earth — made possible with the support of the World Space Week Association.
World Space Week Association Podcasting Team
Host and producer: Haritina Mogoșanu, Co-host: Samuel Leske, Milky-Way.Kiwi
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