After its first year in orbit, ESA’s Biomass satellite is offering new views of Earth’s vegetation cover.

Launched in April 2025, the satellite — one of the European Space Agency’s Earth Explorer missions — has been busily mapping forests and other vegetation, with the primary aim of determining the extent of stored carbon and how it changes globally with time.

The spacecraft is equipped with a fully polarimetric P-band synthetic aperture radar and 12m-wide mesh antenna, used for interferometric imaging.

The radar’s 70cm wavelength is optimised for penetrating forest canopies and measuring ‘biomass,’ the woody trunks, branches and stems where trees store most of their carbon.

“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,” said ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes, Simonetta Cheli, shortly after the satellite was launched last year.

First phase almost complete

With the spacecraft having now just passed the one-year in orbit milestone, ESA has released a series of images that exemplify Biomass’ capabilities.

The mission is being conducted in two phases, with the first, the tomographic phase, currently underway and due to last for roughly another six months.

In this phase, the satellite is producing 3D data with a vertical resolution of 15 to 20 metres and a horizontal resolution of 200 metres.

Next will be the interferometric phase, which will last for about four years and involve taking initial snapshots of each area of forest canopy and density, and then revisiting the same areas four times to enable changes in forest height and above-ground biomass to be calculated and monitored.

Biomass has a mass of 1,250 kilograms and is in a Sun-synchronous, near circular, dawn-dusk orbit at an altitude 666 kilometres.