Anil Madhavapeddy

BIOMASS launches to measure forest carbon flux from space / Jun 2025 / DOI

The BIOMASS forest mission satellite was successfully boosted into space a couple of days ago, after decades of development from just down the road in Stevenage. I'm excited by this because it's the first global-scale P-band SAR instrument that can penetrate forest canopys to look underneath. This, when combined with hyperspectral mapping will give us a lot more insight into global tree health.

Weirdly, the whole thing almost never happened because permission to use the P-band was blocked because it might interfere with US nuclear missile warning radars back in 2013.

Meeting in Graz, Austria, to select the the 7th Earth Explorer mission to be flown by the 20-nation European Space Agency (ESA), backers of the Biomass mission were pelted with questions about how badly the U.S. network of missile warning and space-tracking radars in North America, Greenland and Europe would undermine Biomass’ global carbon-monitoring objectives.

Europe's Earth observation satellite system may be the world's most dynamic, but as it pushes its operating envelope into new areas, it is learning a lesson long ago taught to satellite telecommunications operators: Radio frequency is scarce, and once users have a piece of it they hold fast. -- Spacenews (2013)

Luckily, all this got sorted by international frequency negotiators, and after being built by Airbus in Stevenage (and Germany and France, as it's a complex instrument!) it took off without a hitch. Looking forward to getting my hands on the first results later in the year over at the Centre for Earth Observation.

Check out this cool ESA video about the instrument to learn more, and congratulations to the team at ESA. Looking forward to the next BIOSPACE where there will no doubt be initial buzz about this.

Update 28th June 2025: See also this beautiful BBC article about the satellite, via David Coomes.