New Biomass satellite will provide an unprecedented look at the planet's forests
Earth's forests play a critical role in keeping our planet habitable.
Often called the "lungs of the Earth," forests cover nearly one-third of the planet and absorb vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They also produce oxygen so we can breathe. According to NASA, forests worldwide absorb about 7.6 billion metric tons of CO2 each year.
MORE: How global warming could threaten satellites, according to new study
But that's just an estimate because human industrial activities continue to put more Earth-warning greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Understanding how our forests respond to the increases in greenhouse gas emissions and threats to their existence, such as deforestation and wildfires, is challenging because of the dense vegetation and hard-to-penetrate canopies.
That's about that change.
On Tuesday, the European Space Agency (ESA) put its Biomass satellite into orbit. Biomass is carrying the first P-band synthetic aperture radar in space. You can think of it like an MRI machine designed to provide 3D maps of the planet's forests. The radar can penetrate deep into the vegetation and provide scientists with data about the state of our forests, how they are absorbing and emitting carbon and how human activities like deforestation and wildfires are changing their behaviors.
"With Biomass, we are poised to gain vital new data on how much carbon is stored in the world's forests, helping to fill key gaps in our knowledge of the carbon cycle and, ultimately, Earth's climate system," Simonetta Cheli, ESA director of earth observation programmes, said in a statement.
MORE: Satellite appears to show new highway cutting through Brazil's Amazon rainforest
When left untouched, forests store more carbon than they emit. But because of human-driven land use changes, such as degradation and deforestation, especially in tropical areas, forests are releasing more and more carbon back into the atmosphere, making climate change worse.
"This new mission will advance our ability to quantify forest carbon stocks and fluxes, which is key to understanding and assessing the impacts of climate change," ESA Biomass project manager Michael Fehringer said in a statement.
The Biomass satellite will measure the trunks, branches and stems of the trees that populate the planet's forests. ESA says these measurements will serve as a proxy for determining carbon storage, which is the key goal of the mission.
MORE: California coastal community shifts 4 inches closer to the ocean each week: NASA
According to ESA, 50 companies, including project lead Airbus UK, contributed to developing the satellite. Mission controllers will spend the coming days verifying that the satellite is functioning correctly and that all its systems are working as intended. Once in operation, the mission will take five-and-a-half years to complete.
New Biomass satellite will provide an unprecedented look at the planet's forests originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
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Morrison students help University of Michigan researchers with NASA solar disturbance study
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Is the US forfeiting its Red Planet leadership to China's Mars Sample Return plan?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. While NASA's Mars Sample Return initiative is in political hot water, China is moving ahead on plotting out its rendezvous with the Red Planet. New details of China's aims are emerging. China's intent is to haul back to Earth a Mars treasure trove or rock and soil via its Tianwen-3 mission. The plan calls for launch of two boosters in 2028 in support of their Mars Sample Return (MSR), which could send at least a pound (500 grams) of the extraterrestrial goodies back to Earth around 2031. A drill mounted on China's MSR lander would penetrate to a depth of 6.5 feet (2 meters) to collect several grams of subsurface samples, while a robotic arm will gather more than 400 grams of the foreign surface material from the landing site. Apparently, also on the agenda is use of a robotic helicopter. 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"The mission aims to provide insights into nine scientific themes centered around the main focus of the search for extant and past life on Mars," explains lead author, Zengqian Hou of the Institute of Deep Space Sciences, Deep Space Exploration Laboratory, in Hefei, China. Zengqian and colleagues have outlined where to collect, what to collect, how to collect, and how to analyze those precious Mars selections. "Collecting samples from Mars could provide accurate data on the signs of life," the research team explains. Yiliang Li, a co-author of the Nature Astronomy paper, is an astrobiologist in the Earth sciences division at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). His role mainly involves leading an HKU group that is working on the selection of the landing site for the Tianwen-3 MSR mission. According to an HKU statement, prime exploratory regions on Mars are those where liquid water was likely present in the planet's early history, areas rich in essential metallic nutrients, and sites where traces of Martian microbial activity could potentially be preserved for billions of years. In the meantime, the search for promising sampling sites on Mars "remains an ongoing and active endeavor," the HKU statement adds. Here in the United States, the White House released President Trump's 2026 Discretionary Funding Request that calls for ending financially unsustainable programs - including Mars Sample Return. "In line with the Administration's objectives of returning to the Moon before China and putting a man on Mars, the Budget would reduce lower priority research and terminate unaffordable missions such as the Mars Sample Return mission that is grossly overbudget and whose goals would be achieved by human missions to Mars," the document says. Indeed, over multiple years and multiple reviews of the joint NASA/European Space Agency MSR project there is a sticker-shock price tag; a last estimate was about $11 billion, with samples being returned to Earth in 2040. MSR's mission cost was deemed too costly and would not be achieved on an acceptable time period by NASA's last, non-acting Administrator, Bill Nelson. While techno-squabbles over MSR have been on-going, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has been doggedly on the hunt within Jezero Crater. Since its touchdown in February 2021, the car-sized robot has been obediently gathering rock samples across the martian landscape. Some of those sealed specimens may well contain signs of past life on the Red Planet, and are deemed rocket-ready for pick-up and delivery to Earth. The White House shutdown of the NASA/ESA MSR venture via the Trump budget "forfeits Mars Sample Return to China," declares a recent episode of the popular Mars Guy program, created by Steve Ruff, a leading planetary geologist at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe. The President's budget forfeits the highest priority planetary science goal of MSR to China, but only if the US Congress agrees, Ruff notes. In the interim, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, unveiled in early June his legislative directives for Senate Republicans' budget reconciliation bill, shaped to beat China to Mars and the Moon. It dedicates almost $10 billion to win the new space race with China and ensure America dominates space by making, for one, targeted, critical investments in Mars-forward technology. In the lawmaker's directive, Cruz calls for a Mars Telecommunications Orbiter, pegging $700 million for the commercial procurement of the dual-use orbiter. Its assignment is to handle both a Mars Sample Return mission to return core samples of Mars to Earth, as well as future human Mars missions. But if China is on the MSR march to the Red Planet and NASA isn't, what about China returning already prime pre-selected specimens picked up by NASA's Perseverance Rover still busily at work within Jezero Crater? "China's mission probably won't have access to comparably compelling samples as those collected by Perseverance because of engineering constraints that limit where it can land and the limited mobility options it will have," Ruff explains. "I know from regular comments on my YouTube channel for Mars Guy that there's a commonly held view that the Chinese can or will pick up the samples in Jezero crater. But this simply can't happen given the engineering constraints of their Mars sample return mission as publicly presented. That mission will have neither the landing precision nor mobility on the surface to get to either the sample depot or to Perseverance," Ruff told "So China is not going to save the NASA/ESA MSR mission." On the other hand, China's Zengqian and colleagues state that exploration of Mars is a collective endeavor for all of humanity, writing in Nature Astronomy: "The Tianwen-3 mission is committed to win–win cooperation, harmonious coexistence and shared prosperity through international cooperation. It actively seeks international partnerships through various channels and at various levels for joint scientific research, landing site selection and scientific payload development and testing." Cooperation on MSR between the US and China, however, seems a bit of a dice roll, said Barry E. DiGregorio, founder and director of the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return based in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. While China is inviting international cooperation, recent debates on tariffs between the two nations would seem to make the proposition difficult to hammer out. "Now is the time to consider other options such as sending in-situ life detection instruments to Mars to settle the issue of extant life," DiGregorio told "We need to be sure what the next phase of Mars missions will be. With the continued push to get humans to Mars, astronaut safety should now take priority and that means making sure of biosafety concerns with any indigenous life forms that might be found," said DiGregorio. While China is poised to become the first country to return potentially biologically active planetary material — including potential life forms — from beyond Earth, "the potential risk such substances might pose to terrestrial life, including humans, is a major concern," points out Yiliang at the University of Hong Kong. To arrest that anxiety China plans to construct a specialized MSR facility on the outskirts of Hefei, the capital of Anhui, China. Within that facility, freshly-returned samples from Mars would undergo comprehensive biochemical and pathological testing under strict isolation from the Earth's environment. "Only after it is conclusively determined that the samples contain no active biological agents or substances that could threaten the Earth's biosphere will they be released to designated laboratories for in-depth scientific analysis," concludes the University of Hong Kong statement. The prospect of plucked collectibles to Earth for close-up inspection in state-of-the-art facilities is now literally "up for grabs" — but by what nation? As voiced in a June 23 draft of candidate findings, statements of support/concern by the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), a community-based, interdisciplinary forum: "Ambitious, first-of-their-kind missions like MSR come with challenges but NASA's history of success in difficult endeavors is what makes the US the international leader in deep space exploration," the document states. "Returning the scientifically selected samples that await us on Mars, as part of a balanced portfolio, will help to ensure the US does not cede leadership in deep space to other nations, such as China."
