Mapping the world's forests, said to include some 1.5 trillion trees, is a big, big job—one that will be made a whole lot easier with Europe's newly launched satellite. The European Space Agency on Tuesday launched Biomass, a satellite with a 40-foot-wide, umbrella-shaped antenna, which has the task of creating the first detailed map of the forest biomass, per the Washington Post. "It will effectively weigh forests and how much wood is in forests," the mission's lead scientist, University of Sheffield mathematician and physicist Shaun Quegan, tells the outlet, noting he was brought to tears as a rocket carried Biomass into space from a spaceport in French Guiana.
Forests absorb and store large amounts of carbon dioxide, helping regulate Earth's temperature. But scientists lack data on exactly how much carbon is stored and how much is released back into the atmosphere through deforestation and degradation. As the first satellite equipped with a P-band synthetic aperture radar, which has the longest wavelengths among typical radar bands, Biomass can peer through clouds and all the leaves "to the bits below, which is where all the wood—and half of the world's carbon—is," Quegan tells the Post. "It tells us what's happening to carbon as the world's forests are destroyed and as they grow." The mission also "enables the mapping of subsurface geology in deserts, ice sheet structures, and forest floor topography," ESA says.
Scientists have received a signal indicating the satellite is working as expected in orbit. They'll verify all systems are functioning before deploying the satellite's 40-foot-wide wire-mesh reflector, which acts as an aperture. "It's a bit like deploying an umbrella in space, only a very big one, so we will be looking for that to happen smoothly," Ralph Cordey, head of geosciences at Airbusm, tells the BBC.
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The satellite will initially focus on the tropics, where half of the planet's trees are located, gaining more data with each orbit, per the Post. It'll orbit the Earth 15 to 16 times a day for the next five years. "It's exciting, because it's going to tell us about something that we perhaps take for granted," says Cordey. "Our forests, our trees, how they are contributing to the processes which govern our planet, and in particular, the processes behind climate change." (More European Space Agency stories.)
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