On Thursday a Pasadena-based non-profit launched its second satellite tuned to spotting a powerful climate pollutant on a SpaceX rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Lompoc. State officials partnered with the effort say they can now check twice as often for climate-heating methane plumes, improving the emerging picture of this invisible gas.

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“This means we can make observations at more locations and more frequently at existing locations,” CARB spokesperson Lindsay Buckley said in a statement. Unlike other pollutants, methane is not exhaust. Instead, it leaks, gushes or wafts from landfills, oil and gas equipment and manure pits at dairy operations.

Regulators will be able to to find leaks and follow up faster to make sure operators have made repairs, Buckley added.

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Methane traps heat at about 80 times the rate of carbon dioxide for the decade-plus that it lasts in the air. That makes it urgent to address.

In California, which is required to reduce methane emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, landfills are responsible for about 41% of methane pollution.

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