And this is exactly why _they_ don't want NASA pointing back to Earth... And why they want them to only have enough funding for the megaprojects that redirect federal money into red states.<p>"There's nothing to see here! Move along!"<p>But really, I'm glad they managed to get this out there despite the political shenanigans. It looks like they manage their own shenanigans by providing information / assistance, while not actually doing the leg work on building it or deploying it...<p>It will help to eventually find the hotspots (which, if in the US, are likely businesses skirting laws for profit... Or poor monitoring by the business). In either case, we can have more information on where to act.
The project is funded by 501(c)(3) non-profit Carbon Mapper. Tanager-1 was built by Public Benefit Corp and publicly traded Planet Labs. I understand that the funding raised from the non-profit paid for the licensing of the technology developed at JPL, NASA's only federally funded R&D center managed by CalTech.
It will be interesting to take the data and normalize it by population density. It won’t be a perfect metric since I’m guessing a lot of these plumes will have their source material sourced from elsewhere e.g. landfills, recycling centers, manufacturing