NZ-funded Climate Satellite Likely “Not Recoverable”

MethaneSAT lost contact with the ground last
Friday, and mission operations learned today that
it
has also lost
power.

MethaneSAT said
in May that increased
solar activity had been sending the satellite into
‘safe mode’.

The satellite was launched last March
to track methane emissions from oil and gas. It is New
Zealand’s first official space mission—the
government contributed $29 million to the satellite,
which is primarily funded by a US-based
nonprofit.

Earth Sciences New Zealand
(formerly NIWA) has published a statement on
MethaneSAT’s agricultural
research programme. The University of Auckland’s
Mission Operations Control Centre was due to take over
mission control. A statement from the university is
available here.

The
SMC asked experts to
comment. 

Associate Professor
Nicholas Rattenbury, Department of Physics, University of
Auckland, comments:

“MethaneSat is reported
to be defunct. This is disappointing, of course, for
everyone on the mission development, operations, scientific
and engineering teams. Having been in that position
personally, I sympathise. That a spacecraft fails on orbit
is not surprising. The space environment is unforgiving.
Broken things in orbit tend to stay broken. In some cases,
workarounds can be found, and the space industry has many
examples of extraordinary engineering feats accomplished to
bring a stricken spacecraft back towards full functionality.
However, it appears that MethaneSat is unrecoverable. Space,
as they say in the industry, is hard.

“New Zealand
taxpayers gave $29m
to MethaneSat. The intended aim was growing the NZ space
industry. This would be accomplished through gaining
experience in operating a satellite at The University of
Auckland’s Te
Pūnaha Ātea – Space Institute and through research
led by a NIWA scientist on how to use MethaneSat to measure
agricultural sources of methane. But with this recent
announcement it looks like these benefits will be limited,
at best.

“Even though it appears that New Zealand
was not likely involved in the chain of events leading to
the underperformance of MethaneSat, we as investors in the
project are entitled to an explanation.

“The
technical issues encountered by MethaneSat are not a concern
here for NZ – we didn’t build MethaneSat.  However,
there is a question of whether or not we should have taken a
closer look “under the hood” before investing in
MethaneSat. The principle of caveat emptor is true
for spacecraft as much as it is for purchasing a car. While
we were not involved in the MethaneSat mission design,
satellite construction and testing, we were certainly
entitled to such relevant information so we could make a
fully informed decision on whether or not to invest. A
question, then: Who on behalf of the NZ taxpayer was asking
these and similar questions prior to our investment and how
were the answers used in the decision-making
process?

“New Zealand has scientists and engineers
working at public-funded universities that can contribute to
future decision-making processes for the next space mission
supported by the New Zealand taxpayer. During the MethaneSat
post-mortem, a question that could reasonably be asked is to
what extent these experts were consulted during the
decision-making process to invest in MethaneSat. What
lessons here could be learned to inform the next process
through which we as a nation invest in a future space
mission? When questions were being asked about the health of
MethaneSat, to what extent are we, as investors, happy with
the explanation that much information was veiled owing to
reported obligations
of confidentiality or commercial sensitivity?

“I
work towards fostering the New Zealand space sector,
especially in the areas where we can push back the
boundaries of human knowledge via the safe, peaceful and
sustainable use of space. Space is hard, unforgiving,
expensive and frustrating. It can also be rewarding, and
this is part of the excitement that I see  reflected in
the students I teach. For a nation with ambitions to utilise
space for science, technological development and commercial
gain we also have to acknowledge that failure is a part of
that journey. To make the best use of our very limited
resources, we owe it to ourselves to examine our processes
in the fullest light of disclosure and by leveraging all
available expertise.”

Conflict of interest
statement: “I am not associated with MethaneSAT in any
way. These views are not necessarily those held by The
University of Auckland.”

Professor
Richard Easther, Department of Physics, University of
Auckland, comments:

“First and foremost,
this is a tragedy for the people here who worked hard on it,
and for New Zealand science.

“However, it is
important to remember that a key justification for us
getting involved with MethaneSAT was to “build capacity”
to operate in space as a country and we can still get a
return on our investment by learning from this
loss.

“I was excited when we got involved in 2019,
but MethaneSAT was years late launching and kept pumping out
upbeat comms even after it became clear that the spacecraft
had major problems.

“As a country we need a “no
blame” review to understand how New Zealand blew past so
many red flags about MethaneSAT’s operation. Rocket
Lab’s success creates a remarkable platform for New
Zealand to do low-cost, globally significant space missions
and our involvement with MethaneSAT has squandered that
opportunity.

“However, if the best time to start
would have been 2019, the second best is tomorrow – the
opportunity is still there.

“But without getting
ahead of the post mortem it is clear that we need to make
better decisions about strategy and that will only happen if
expertise in the science community is fully engaged from the
outset.”

Conflict of interest statement: Easther
is a professor of physics at the University of Auckland but
has had no direct involvement with the university
contribution to MethaneSAT. He is commenting as an academic
engaged with the New Zealand space sector and is not
speaking on behalf of the
institution.

Professor Craig Rodger,
Beverly Professor of Physics, University of Otago,
comments:

Note: Professor Rodger is an
expert in solar weather.

Are satellites
often ‘lost’?
“Satellites do go into safe
mode and need to be reset. Satellites are also sometimes
lost – for example, there is internal damage which
triggers them going into safe mode but they never come back
and just stop talking to you. But that sort of thing is
pretty damn rare.

“When satellite operators talk
about ‘safe mode’, that’s usually in the context of
impacts triggered by the satellite being bombarded by hot
protons and hot electrons. When they are around, it’s a
tough environment to put your spacecraft in. The thing
that surprises me is that the space environment was
relatively benign around the 20th of June (when they lost
contact with MethaneSAT), and had been for a few weeks.
I’m not saying it was dead quiet, but it was sort-of
background level conditions – especially for this
time in the 11 year solar cycle where the sun is restless in
a big way, and when we expect the environment to be a bit
challenging.”

How can solar weather affect
satellites?
“There have been moments when
it’s been interesting in the last year and a bit, but
there have not been extreme conditions in the space
environment. In that time there was some unusually cool
stuff in terms of the atmosphere – you may have seen
the aurora in May or October last year – and also
geomagnetic storms. However, that activity wasn’t linked
to events making a horrible space environment. It’s like
weather: we aren’t talking about something extreme like
‘Cyclone Gabrielle’, we’re talking about normal
slightly active conditions where ‘some storms have come
through’. Typically people build their equipment to handle
that. We haven’t had something like Cyclone Gabrielle
in the space environment for about 20 years, in terms of
radiation doses. So it’s puzzling, what has happened here
with MethaneSAT.

Is this a concern for other
satellites?
“One thing that has been talked
about for a while now is that during the last solar maximum,
roughly 11 years ago, it was unusually benign. So
if you are a spacecraft engineer who has grown up in an
environment where everything is pretty quiet, there’s
a worry you will build for conditions that have been like
that for your entire life. This would ignore the
fact that 20 or 30 years ago we made measurements in
space that were like ‘holy crap what’s going on right
now?’ The satellites back then had bad days, but were
well built. The new space industry has developed in very
quiet conditions, and now we’re moving into more normal
times, and if you’re not ready for that normal
background level of space weather, that’s a potential
problem.

“But we are not hearing internationally of
lots of spacecraft just dropping dead. Maybe some people
have got a particularly fascinating design with certain
issues and sensitivities, but we are not constantly
hearing about how the enhanced solar activity
is causing many satellites to have major problems.
I’m not saying there’s zero issues, we have some, but
this isn’t an incredible big deal across the world for
other satellite operators.

“There are a lot of
satellites nowadays made by students in universities as a
learning experience – there are a very large number of
those which are referred to as ‘dead on arrival’, or
‘DoA’. They never survive launch or don’t turn on when
they get to orbit. It used to be that more than half
of student satellites were ‘dead on arrival’, but
as people get their act together, that number is going
down. That issue is linked to a very specific satellite
manufacturing sub-environment where you don’t have
experienced engineers – it’s all about learning,
whereas I hope that the people who designed MethaneSAT had a
lot of knowledge about spacecraft design and
the environment it was going into.

“Now, I’ve
never designed a satellite – it would be ‘dead on
arrival’ if I built a satellite. But I do watch the
satellite environment and the information from the NOAA
Space Weather Prediction Center in the US and so I have an
idea of the ranges of activity that occur – what quiet
looks like, what disturbed looks like, what ‘big arse
holy crap’ looks like. Conditions have not been
really active, but MethaneSAT seems to be
having a bad time for quite a while now.

“The other
thing that can happen is that you just get unlucky in terms
of space environment and you happen to fly through something
– your hardware triggers and you go into safe mode. But
that’s like winning the Lotto. From what we’ve been told
in the media, it sounds like this has happened to MethaneSat
multiple times. These guys are apparently being repeatedly
unlucky, and that’s weird. That would happen if you have
something fundamentally wrong with the design of your
spacecraft – but it’s hard to suggest anything
definitive because the information that’s been
provided, while it uses technical and meaningful words,
doesn’t give enough detail to link it to what’s really
been happening.”

No conflicts of
interest.

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