ESA’s biomass space mission weighs forests as climate truth

The European Space Agency successfully launched its biomass satellite on April 29, marking a critical moment in forest monitoring, which scientists call the dawn of the “forest space age”. The groundbreaking mission flew a Vega-C rocket on the European Spaceport at 11:15 CEST, and the technology it carries can basically weigh the earth’s forest weight from space.

The satellite’s revolutionary P-band synthetic aperture radar can penetrate even the densest forest canopies to measure woody biomass – trunks, branches and stems, and trees store most of the carbon. These measurements are proxy for carbon storage, providing critical data that has been avoided until now by scientists.

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Less than an hour after launch, mission controllers at the ESA European Space Center in Germany received confirmation that the biomass had successfully separated from the rocket’s upper stage and was operating as expected in orbit.

“Biomass is now joining our family of esteemed Earth Explorers – these missions have been providing groundbreaking discoveries and advanced scientific understanding of our planet,” said Simonetta Cheli, director of ESA’s Earth Observation Program. “With biomass, we are ready to have important new data on how much carbon is stored in the world’s forests, which helps fill the critical gap in our knowledge of the carbon cycle and ultimately the Earth’s climate system.”

The mission represents the culmination of the twenty-year journey of Lars Ulander, a professor of radar remote sensing at Chalmers University of Technology. “Our idea is to use a very special radar to map the world’s forests from space. The goal is to understand how forests affect climate and how climate change affects forests,” Ulande explained.

Forests absorb about 8 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year, acting as the Earth’s “green lungs” and helping to regulate the Earth’s temperature. However, deforestation and degradation, especially in tropical regions, release carbon back into the atmosphere, thus accelerating climate change. So far, scientists and policy makers lack accurate data on forest carbon storage and how these stocks have changed over time.

From orbits 666 kilometers above the Earth, biomass will continue to generate global forest maps to address this critical data gap. This is the first satellite equipped with a fully polarized P-band synthetic aperture radar for interference imaging – the technology uses a radar wavelength of about 70 cm and a length of more than 70 cm, which can be cut into forest canopies and measure the biomass below.

The controller is now performing a complex “launch and early orbit” phase, which includes a massive 12-meter entire mesh reflector for deploying the satellite, supported by a 7.5-meter boom. Once run, biomass will be added to other space-based forest monitoring technologies, including NASA’s GEDI LIDAR system on the International Space Station and the upcoming US-India Nisar mission.

Despite these technological advancements, experts stress that ground verification is still essential. Professor Oliver Phillips of the University of Leeds said: “Even state-of-the-art satellites cannot speak mahogany from Brazilian nut trees without the help of the ground, there are 10,000 species of trees in the Amazon alone.”

To bridge this gap, researchers launched Geo-Trees, a global initiative that unites forestry, ecology and remote sensing experts. “The purpose of geographic trees is to establish a sustainable funding mechanism to support ecologists and experts working in forests to perform tree-by-tree measurements to validate satellite data products,” explains Klaus Scipal, biomass mission manager at ESA.

This collaboration between space technology and ground science embodies the multidisciplinary approach needed to address climate change. Scipal added: “Satellites such as our biomass provide a lot of information to understand our ever-changing world, but we have to forget those who are relentlessly doing field measurements on the ground, often under difficult conditions, where they can be confident in the data returned from space.”

The biomass mission is carried out at critical moments, as accurate forest carbon data are becoming increasingly important for climate science and policy. With more precise information, researchers can refine climate models and deepen their understanding of the carbon cycle, ultimately informing more effective climate action strategies.

As biomass starts its mission to spin the Earth every 98 minutes, it represents not only a new chapter in human relations with forests, but also an unprecedented insight into these important ecosystems and their role in regulating the climate of our planet. For the first time, scientists will adopt a global, consistent approach to “weighting” world forests and tracking their changes over time, providing important data in the fight against climate change.

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