See Earth's Forests as Never Before in Biomass Satellite's First Images
On June 23 the ESA released the mission's first images, which showcase its unique capability to peer through dense vegetation to study our planet's forests and other ecosystems as never before. Using cutting-edge radar technologies, the satellite is on a five-year mission to survey forests across sprawling swaths of the globe, looking beneath their canopies to accurately assess their total woody biomass—trunks, limbs, stems, and so on. By measuring all that material and how it's changing over time, scientists can better monitor deforestation trends and track the flow of carbon through ecosystems to enhance our understanding of Earth's rapidly changing climate. The satellite is still in its six-month-long commissioning phase, but now we have a taste of what is to come.
The image shown above displays a section of the Amazon rainforest in Bolivia with the Beni River meandering through. Each color represents a different ecosystem feature: black for rivers and lakes, pink for wetlands and floodplains, green for rainforests, and purple for grasslands. The World Resources Institute's Global Forest Review ranks Bolivia among the top 10 countries with the most tree cover loss between 2001 and 2024. During this time, Bolivia lost the equivalent of 15 percent of the total forest cover it had in 2000, in large part to encroaching agricultural plots and cattle ranches. These images and their associated data can help researchers keep careful tabs on deforestation and its impacts on local and global ecosystems.
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The image below highlights the satellite's power by comparing its observations with those gathered by a Biomass predecessor, ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission, in the same location. The new pictures represent a significant increase in detail that is primarily owed to Biomass's main instrument: the P-band synthetic aperture radar. P-band radio waves are longer than others more typically used in such radar systems, allowing them to pass through layers of foliage, soil and other materials to create accurate three-dimensional maps of otherwise hidden landscape features.
Because of engineering challenges as well as diplomatic ones, this is the first time P-band radar has been used in orbital Earth observations—the P-band radio frequency is typically reserved for American and European missile-detection systems. (In order to ensure it will not interfere with the U.S. Department of Defense's space-object-tracking radar systems, Biomass will not observe North and Central America, Europe, and some Arctic regions.)
The next three images below demonstrate just how deep the P-band radar can go. They display topographic features of rainforests in Indonesia, the Sahara Desert in Chad and the Transantarctic Mountains adjacent to the Nimrod Glacier in Antarctica, respectively.
Pictured above is Indonesia's mountainous Halmahera rainforest, featuring rugged topography shaped by outpourings from the numerous volcanoes that pockmark the region. One of them, the active volcano Mount Gamalama, can be seen off the coast on the far left.
Though the main goal of the Biomass satellite is to catalog forests, it will also study other environments.
Above is a portion of the Tibesti Mountains situated in the central Sahara Desert in northern Chad. Able to map features as far as five meters beneath dry sand, the satellite can reveal ancient geologic details, such as dried-up riverbeds and lakes, now buried below the Sahara's ever-shifting dunes. These data can help researchers understand past ecological changes in such regions—and could even help unearth hidden pockets of precious groundwater in arid, remote deserts.
Biomass can also penetrate into ice, pictured below, and collect information about ice-sheet structure and movement that could be used to better understand what controls the slide of glaciers into the sea.
Below, another image features jungle-covered terrain in Gabon and prominently displays the Ivindo River, which nurtures the surrounding rainforest. The predominantly green color of the image indicates dense vegetal growth—a sign of a healthy rainforest.
The final image shown here, below, is the very first one the satellite produced. It displays a portion of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, highlighting the topography of the region alongside features such as rivers, wetlands and grasslands.
Only a small portion of the vast Amazon has been studied in-depth and on the ground. This is largely because of its scale and the associated difficulty of reaching some of its most remote regions. Innovative satellites like Biomass could greatly increase our knowledge of these overlooked places and similar ones around the world, helping researchers better understand—and protect—our changing planet and its myriad beautiful ecosystems.
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The first thing you see when you step out is just ice everywhere. You're really new to this environment, and sometimes it feels a little bit like being on another planet. There's an Italian station there, and we were supposed to stay for a day. But what we learned very fast is that, in French, we say, en Antarctique pas de pronostique , meaning, 'no forecast in Antarctica,' because the weather is super unpredictable. So, instead of staying one night, we stayed almost a week. This station is just a logistical one; it's not meant to host people, and everyone who stays there blocks others from coming in. It's a real logistical challenge for the people working there, so they want us to leave as fast as possible. But the weather is so unpredictable that you can't just take a plane and go inland. You need to wait until the weather is almost stable, and the pilot says, 'I'm ready to fly,' because he has the final word. I still had my data problem from before, and I was trying to connect to the internet. There, it was like the internet of the '90s—you know, beep beep beep . I tried to log in, and finally, after maybe two or three hours, on one computer, I got to the stage where it said, 'OK, I'm going to log in to your account so you can download your stuff. Please give me your phone number. I'm going to send you an SMS to log in.' That was the double verification, and it wasn't working because, obviously, there's no phone service. So I couldn't access my data because of this double verification. Finally, we took a plane. This one is smaller, a Basler BT-67 plane, which comes from Canada to fly within Antarctica and then goes back to Canada at the end of the season. This plane ride took four hours. It's a non-pressurized plane. You make sure to put all your clothes on, to be ready to go out in Concordia, because it's about minus 30 Celsius. We were super afraid. 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They told us, 'Just stay calm for the next few days.' Concordia is accessible only by aircraft during the summer months, from November to February. In winter, temperatures plummet to minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit. Photograph: ESA/IPEV/PNRA - A. Kumar The station is made of two towers, with 18 faces for each tower. It's basically white, with a little bit of orange, and that's it. You enter through a tunnel between the two towers. You take off your boots and leave all your stuff there. It's quite small. Then you can go to the left, which is the 'calm tower.' Inside, you have the dormitories, the laboratories, and the hospital. It has three floors. The middle floor is dormitories, and the upper floor is laboratories. It's called the 'calm tower' to keep it calm. Then we go to the other tower, on the right side from the entrance. It has the technical stuff. On the second floor, there's the video room for movies and the sports room. On the top, you have the living room, the eating area, and the kitchen. In five minutes, you've done the tour of your new home. It's super impressive because you think, 'Someone had to build this in the middle of nowhere. Someone had to take the first steps.' And this is just incredible. So many people go to Antarctica with nothing. We arrive here, and we have the luxury of having this building to protect us from this environment. It's so out of this world to be there. We've seen a lot of pictures of Antarctica, and we've probably read a lot of books, but you've never been in the center of Antarctica, which is quite different. There's no life—no birds, no trees—there's literally nothing, nothing but ice and wind.
