According to Euronews.next, GHGSat is a Canadian company that recently announced it launched a satellite which can detect carbon dioxide emissions from polluting individual sites, such as steel mills and coal plants, directly from space. Vanguard is the name of the satellite that's been launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The recorded data, as per GHGSat officials, will be up for sale to the individual heavy polluters that want to reduce their impact on the environment. There is already an existing number of satellites that detect greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), such as methane, although this is harder to spot, as it can leak from smaller sources, such as farms and drill sites.

Accounting for 80% of US' GHG footprint, a lot of the carbon dioxide emissions reach the atmosphere from large industrial facilities.

Stephane Germain, CEO of Montreal-based GHGSat, said that Vanguard will help detect per-facility emissions, helping companies more accurately assess the impact their operations have on the environment, as well as how to mitigate it.

"Often what we find is a mix of direct measurements and estimates - therefore having a direct measurement of the entire facility from a satellite will act as a validation", he explained. Satellite-collected data may have already suggested that the methane levels within our planet could be higher than what we previously known and Germain believes that the same could be true for CO2.