TANGO Spacecraft

Quantify and monitor greenhouse gas emissions at the level of individual power plants and industrial facilities

The TANGO mission will consist of two CubeSats, each carrying a TNO Spectrolite instrument. They will provide targeted observations to quantify and monitor greenhouse gas emissions at the level of individual power plants and industrial facilities. It’s uniqueness:

• Open data policy
• User driven target selection
• Unprecedented precision to quantify emission
• CO2, CH4 and NO2 measurement
• 300x300m2 spatial resolution

The targeted monitoring data of TANGO will be highly complimentary to the global observations of Copernicus missions such as Sentinel-5p, Sentinel-5 and CO2M.

The TANGO mission will use two Spectrolite instruments to measure:

• CO2 emissions larger than 5Mt/year, for example from power plants, which in the EU alone represent about 44% of the annual CO2 emission,
• CH4 emissions larger than 10kt/year, for example from oil & gas installations, landfills, and coal mines, which in the EU alone are estimated to represent about 68% of total methane emissions, and
• NOx emissions, which will improve the detection of CO2 plumes, deriving historic CO2 emission trends based on readily available global NOx measurements, and to detangle the possible CO2 contribution in mixed CH4 - CO2

The Spectrolite family of instruments was developed using the legacy of technology from the highly successful TROPOMI instrument that is currently operational on the Copernicus Sentinel 5p missions.

TANGO and NanoMagSat, during the consolidation phase, showed criticalities related to technology development. These 2 missions were therefore proposed by ESA to undergo RRA. The RRA progress nominally with within Q3 2023, at which point these 2 missions will be evaluated for the DVP.

• PLATFORM - ISISpace