Methane-capable satellites and survey aircraft are in a position to image U.S. oil and gas sites every week, on schedules nobody sends you. Orbital Alert keeps a dated record of every pass and flight that could have imaged your acreage, so every observation is one you can explain.
No login, no commitment. Send your acreage to michael@orbitalalert.com and we'll show you every satellite pass and survey flight that was in a position to image your wells last month, on your own footprint, not a canned demo.
A third party imaged your site on a clear morning. You found out two months later, from a third-party report, and were asked about a day you can no longer go back and observe.
That gap isn't a monitoring problem. It's an information problem. The pass happened in public; the knowledge of it never reached you. Nearly every third-party plume report, activist claim, and press inquiry starts in that gap — and the operator is always the last one standing in it.
Orbital Alert closes the gap. One view of every pass and flight that could have imaged your acreage: what was overhead, what it could actually detect that day, which of your sites sat under it, and a dated record of all of it.
Shaped by EHS, LDAR, and regulatory leaders at U.S. onshore operators — around how their weeks actually run.
One forward calendar of every capable satellite pass over your footprint — ranked by what could realistically be detected that day, not just what was geometrically overhead. Survey aircraft near your sites are tracked as they fly. Your team gets a short list of the windows that matter, per asset, instead of a firehose of orbital noise.
Questions about a site usually arrive weeks after the observation. Knowing which capable instruments were and will be over each site means your own LDAR and inspection records sit beside every third-party observation, so the documentation is already written when someone asks for it.
A date-stamped record of every satellite pass and survey flight that could have imaged any site you operate. When a claim, a third-party report, or a reporter's question arrives, your team produces the timeline in minutes: who was overhead, when, and what each could detect, beside your own records of what you did.
It's the first reaction we get from serious EHS leaders, and it's the right instinct to have. The honest answer: you cannot un-emit into a satellite's field of view. If an instrument images your site, it does so whether or not you know about it, and the data exists either way. Nothing here changes what is in the data.
What it changes is who knows first. When monitoring is overhead, the right response isn't to hide — it's to verify, fix, and document. Operators working from the same picture on the same day close real leaks sooner, and they can show a record of deliberate response instead of a scramble. That record is the asset.
The highest-value moment isn't being observed — it's knowing which commercial providers' satellites can reach your sites in the coming week, so you can ask about commissioning imagery of your own assets. The same pass you used to hear about second-hand becomes data you ordered, you hold, and you control. The Surveillance Calendar shows which of your sites fall inside which provider's window; lead times and ordering are between you and the provider.
Pick a site and a date range in Facility Backtrack and get the observation record: every satellite pass and survey flight that could have imaged that location, time-stamped, with what each was capable of resolving and the third-party detections already published nearby. Any month prints as an Evidence Packet with its sources: a factual record to keep beside your own monitoring, valuable even to a team that never wants a single alert.
Know which capable instruments will be over each site in the week ahead, and keep that forecast on file beside your own inspection and LDAR records. If a third party later publishes something from one of those passes, the dated record is already in place and the explanation comes from your own records.
Had a blowdown, an upset, or an unplanned release? Ask what was actually overhead during that window. If something was, you know now — while the crew still remembers the day, the readings are fresh, and your response gets documented on your timeline instead of someone else's.
A pass overhead is not a detection. The work is in the other ninety percent — and that is where years of this have gone.
Ask five vendors which satellites can actually see methane and you will get five different answers — most padded with retired birds, CO₂-only payloads, and instruments carrying no methane bands at all. Every entry in our catalog has been confirmed against the sensor, the band, and the tasking path, and every look-alike excluded deliberately. It is re-verified as fleets launch, drift, and decay.
Most flyover alerts amount to an orbit propagator and a radius. Ours accounts for how far a given instrument can steer off its ground track to reach you, whether the sun was where that sensor needs it to be, and how stale the orbital data itself had grown by the time of the pass. That is the difference between a record a team can stand behind and a list of flyovers nobody trusts.
A large share of the survey flying over U.S. basins is done by aircraft on no public list. We identify each aircraft from its FAA registered owner and a sourced registry of operators, every entry graded by the strength of its public evidence. An operator is called a survey operator only on strong evidence; aerial patrol companies are named as what they are, patrol operators. An aircraft whose operator is not established is held for review and not counted, and a flight pattern never identifies an operator.
Basin-level alerting is a weather forecast for an entire state. We resolve coverage down to the individual asset — which wells, which facilities, which pads sit under a given window — across hundreds of thousands of indexed U.S. onshore locations, so the answer always points at somewhere your team can go stand.
Your own console, built on your wells. Look up any site in Facility Backtrack and see every satellite that imaged or could have imaged it, to the minute, with the survey aircraft that flew nearby and the methane detections published around it.
The Surveillance Calendar shows which instruments can reach each site over the coming week, and any site's month prints as an Evidence Packet with its sources, ready to file beside your own monitoring. Every row answers the questions an EHS lead actually has: what was overhead, which of my sites were in reach, and what could it detect. Paying customers can also get a short daily brief by email.
See it on your own acreageSend us your acreage and we'll run a free 30-day lookback across your footprint — every pass and every survey flight that was in a position to image your sites, and every nearby published detection. No login, no commitment, no obligation to continue. Most operators find at least one thing they didn't know.