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.