The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
Go to topicThank you for liking
You have already liked this page, you can only like it once!
Biomass is designed to orbit our planet at an altitude of 666 km in a Sun-synchronous dawn-dusk orbit. The animation shows how the satellite measures Earth over time. While it shows how global coverage builds up in a generic sense, the Biomass mission actually commences with a single tomographic global coverage phase, which takes about 18 months, to reveal the structure of forests. This is then followed by multiple nine-month interferometric global coverages for the remainder of the mission’s life to understand how forests change over time.
The animation also clearly shows that thanks to Biomass’ left-looking geometry, in combination with its Sun-synchronous orbit, the data gap over Antarctica is smaller than for most other synthetic aperture radar missions. This bigger-than-usual coverage benefits ice-sheet science, which is one of Biomass’ secondary science objectives.