Prof. Stefano Tebaldini from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering – Politecnico di Milano has been appointed Scientific Coordinator of the BIOMASS Data Science and Innovation Cluster (DISC)—a five-year ESA-funded project awarded to a consortium of eight leading European universities and research centers, as well as industrial partners. The cluster is tasked with researching, developing, validating, and curating the quality of all BIOMASS mission products.
The European Space Agency (ESA) BIOMASS mission was successfully launched on April 29, 2025, from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana. Its objective is to deliver unprecedented insights into the world’s forests and how they change over time.
Featuring a 12-metre wire-mesh reflector, the BIOMASS instrument is the longest-wavelength spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) ever operated in space. It not only provides high-resolution images of forests, but can also penetrate vegetation to reveal its internal structure using advanced 3D tomographic imaging techniques, first studied at Politecnico di Milano since 1995. The satellite orbits Earth at an altitude of 666 kilometres, delivering global maps of forest biomass repeated over time.
BIOMASS was proposed in 2005 by a team led by Prof. Shaun Quegan (University of Sheffield) and Dr. Thuy Le Toan (CESBIO, Toulouse), then officially selected for implementation in 2013. Today, BIOMASS is finally collecting data to measure above-ground forest biomass, forest height, disturbances, and long-term changes—key parameters for addressing current gaps in our understanding of the role of forests in the global carbon cycle. Beyond forestry, BIOMASS supports a wide range of secondary objectives, including mapping terrain topography beneath dense vegetation, ice-sheet tomography and flow tracking, investigating subsurface signals in arid regions, and characterizing the ionosphere.
Photo: ©ESA