Latest news with #ShaunQuegan
Washington Post
29-04-2025
- Science
- Washington Post
Satellite launches with mission to ‘weigh' the world's forests
A satellite with a 40-foot extendable antenna has launched into space with a giant mission: to map all of the world's forests, ecosystems that are crucial for sucking up carbon and slowing climate change. The Biomass mission will paint a detailed global picture of Earth's forests, the European Space Agency said, peeking beneath their canopies to reveal where they are thickest and how that is changing — including as a result of climate change and deforestation. Scientists say the data will offer a glimpse into the carbon-zapping capabilities of one of Earth's best defenses against climate change. The Vega-C rocket containing the satellite successfully launched into space at 6:16 a.m. local time from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, the ESA said. The umbrella-shaped satellite, built by Airbus, will orbit Earth about 15 or 16 times a day at an altitude of 413 miles for five years. 'It will effectively weigh forests and how much wood is in forests,' Shaun Quegan, the mission's lead scientist, said in an interview Tuesday. 'When you look from above, what you see is leaves. This satellite doesn't see the leaves at all. It sees right through the leaves to the bits below, which is where all the wood — and half of the world's carbon — is. It tells us what's happening to carbon as the world's forests are destroyed and as they grow.' Quegan, a mathematician and physicist at the University of Sheffield, said he cried with emotion as he watched the launch from the ESA's operation center in Darmstadt, Germany. 'We waited and waited. It was like hearing the first cry of the baby.' Quegan first conceived of using a P-band radar to map the world's forests about 20 years ago. Up until 2004, the technology was restricted to use by the U.S. Defense Department, he said. The radar's unusually long wavelength allows it to pierce through the leaves and small branches of a forest's thick canopy and measure the woody trunks, branches and leaves that sit beneath. It is then bounced back to the satellite in space, which captures the data on a 40-foot deployable antenna. That calculation — forest biomass — is important 'because it's a significant reservoir of carbon in the Earth's system, and it's not something at the moment that we have a really strong handle on, ' said Tristan Quaife, a climate scientist at the University of Reading and Britain's National Center for Earth Observation who was not involved in the mission. Climate change, deforestation and other human factors are eroding the capabilities of forests to absorb carbon dioxide. Matt Disney, an environmental scientist at University College London who is contributing research to the space mission, stepped away from a watch party with other scientists in London for a phone interview Tuesday, shortly after the successful launch. He said the P-radar will collect swaths of data on each orbit it makes around Earth. He said it has been calibrated to focus initially on the tropics, where detailed biomass data is lacking. The mission will then use biomass data collected through fieldwork by other scientists, including Disney, to calibrate the satellite and ensure its conversion of data into biomass estimates is accurate. Previously, scientists estimated biomass by extrapolating data from field measurement — which is difficult to collect at a large scale. In particular, information on remote forests in the tropics — where half of the world's trees are — is patchy. 'If you're going to start basing policy and making international agreements around what we should be doing to protect forests and how much money we should spend on doing that, then you need to have numbers that are both credible and that people will sign up to,' Disney said. Tuesday's launch represents the first attempt to map Earth's forest biomass on a global scale using this type of radar, the scientists said. It will join other satellites to form a constellation of satellites in space tracking woodland forest cover. NASA's GEDI instrument on the International Space Station provides detailed observations about forest canopies, but it uses smaller lasers that cannot collect the same level of data. A Japanese satellite uses L-band radar to monitor forest cover, but it is not able to penetrate beneath the canopy in the same way as Biomass. Other efforts to map every tree on Earth have used artificial intelligence on existing satellite images. Scientists have previously tracked deforestation at a local level, but it has been difficult to measure forest vegetation levels in a globally consistent way. The existing studies do not paint a positive picture. One published in 2020 found that the rainforest in central Africa's Congo Basin was losing its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, apparently as a result of drought and increasing heat. Under Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, deforestation of the Amazon rainforest — which is estimated to store 123 billion tons of carbon — reached a 15-year high, The Washington Post reported in 2022. Disney said the initial first light data will be available to the space mission within days, and the first publicly available data will be available in about a year's time.
Telegraph
29-04-2025
- Science
- Telegraph
Earth's forests to be weighed using ‘space umbrella'
Earth's forests will be weighed for the first time using a giant 'space umbrella' that can peer through tree canopies from orbit. On Tuesday morning, the British-built Biomass satellite launched from the European spaceport in French Guiana for a five-year mission to find out how much carbon the planet's trees hold. Although it is known that trees suck up carbon, holding it in their wood, nobody knows how much storage space exists across Earth. Most of the world's trees grow in remote rainforests that are difficult to access, and illegal loggers are known to strip below the canopies to avoid deforestation being picked up on aircraft fly-bys. Space radars can see the tops of forests but do not penetrate further down and they can be blinded by cloud cover. The Biomass satellite will orbit 413 miles above Earth's surface and use special radar to take layered scans of the trees to build up a complete picture of their height and mass. Dr Paul Bate, the head of the UK Space Agency, said: 'It's nearly 20 years since this idea was conceived so to see Biomass launched successfully is a really important milestone. You would think down here on Earth we should be able to access the forests, but we're never going to be able to have people physically counting every tree, so this is a big step forward. 'Climate modelling has many variables, and the total biomass of the planet is one of the least understood ones, so the more accurate they are, the better the models. 'Biomass will be able to look down, right through the canopy and measure the height and density and different layers of forests. It's groundbreaking science and we will learn things we didn't know.' The world's rainforests are made of more than one and half trillion trees and are often referred to as the 'lungs of the earth', storing billions of tonnes of carbon. But, until now, measuring exactly how much carbon they store has been virtually impossible. The satellite, commissioned by the European Space Agency, was developed by Prof Shaun Quegan, a University of Sheffield academic, and built at Airbus in Stevenage. It carries a P-band radar with a long wavelength of about 70 cm, allowing the signal to penetrate through the forest canopy recording trees like a CT scan to build up a picture of how much wood is present. It can also see through clouds. Prof Quegan said: 'It will revolutionise our understanding of the volume of carbon held in the most impenetrable tropical rainforests on the planet and, crucially, how this is changing over time.' The satellite is now safely in orbit, but is in its folded up state, and will begin to open on May 2, being fully operational by mid June when it will start delivering scientific data. Scientists are expecting a 3D map of tropical forests after 17 months, then new maps every nine months for the rest of the five-year mission, showing how the forests are changing. Observations will also lead to better insight into the rates of habitat loss. 'Satellite now safely in orbit' Alain Fauré, the head of space systems at Airbus Defence and Space, said: 'Biomass will give scientists and climatologists unprecedented data on the state of the world's forests, further enhancing the understanding of the climate cycle. 'The spacecraft is now safely in orbit and ready to deliver its precious data.' The Biomass mission will also map subsurface geology to search for new water sources in deserts, and monitor the structure of ice sheets. Sir Chris Bryant, the space minister, said: 'The Biomass mission showcases British ingenuity at its very best, from conception in Sheffield to construction in Stevenage. 'Britain is not only stepping to the forefront of the space industry, but of global climate action too.'
