Airbus Space Systems, part of the global major aerospace group Airbus, announced on Tuesday that the Biomass forest-monitoring satellite had been successfully launched into space, on a Vega-C rocket, from the launch base at Kourou, known as ‘Europe’s Space Port’. Kourou is in French Guiana, in South America.

Biomass was developed, built and tested by Airbus Space Systems at its facilities at Stevenage in the UK, Friedrichshafen in Germany and Toulouse in France, on behalf of the European Space Agency (ESA – which is completely separate from the EU). In all, more than 50 companies from 20 countries were involved in the development and testing of the satellite.

Biomass is an ESA flagship mission, part of the agency’s Earth Explorer programme. The satellite is orbiting, as planned, 666 km above the Earth’s surface and has an expected life of five years. It will measure forest biomass, thereby allowing the assessment of both terrestrial carbon stocks and fluxes. In turn, this will allow scientists to get a better understanding of the carbon cycle and how it affects climate change.

“Biomass will give scientists and climatologists unprecedented data on the state of the world’s forests, further enhancing the understanding of the climate cycle,” explained Airbus Defence and Space head of space systems Alain Fauré. “The spacecraft is now safely in orbit and ready to deliver its precious data.”

The satellite will be able to do so owing to its primary sensor, a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) which operates in the P-band and which Airbus describes as “revolutionary”. The P-band is a low frequency band, generally regarded as being between 225 MHz and 390 MHz, and can penetrate through vegetation. Biomass -s carrying the first-ever space-borne P-band radar, and will deploy a 12 m antenna to capture the ground-reflected SAR pulses.

“Biomass’ P-band radar will see through the forest canopy to the ground, improving current Digital Elevation Models in densely forested areas and provide a completely new view of the Earth’s surface,” highlighted Airbus Space Systems.

The next phase of the mission is the in-orbit commissioning. The ground-based calibration transponder is being managed and delivered by a separate team. This transponder will be located at New Norcia in Western Australia (some 132 km north of Perth), where ESA already has a ground station.

“Biomass will also be able to measure palaeo aquifers in desert regions to find new water sources in arid regions as well as contribute to observations of ice sheet dynamics, subsurface geology and forest topography,” the company pointed out.