Looking at a career in space, climate or satellites? You may be surprised at how many skills other than science and data are involved too! Find out more in this new STEM resource from the UK Space Agency
Missions
The UK is making crucial contributions to three future climate satellite missions that will provide essential information for effective climate action and monitoring of progress in addressing climate change from space.
TRUTHS, the first climate mission led by the UK Space Agency and implemented through the European Space Agency (ESA), MicroCarb and BIOMASS are being designed and built using UK skills and facilities.
Discover more about each mission, the expertise of Space4Climate members involved and the pivotal role the satellites will play in gathering and supplying Earth observation data for climate decisions and climate services for adaptation and mitigation in our plain language videos. Hear directly from the world-leading scientists at the forefront of the missions and from the people building the satellite instruments in the UK.
Take a look at the short videos on our YouTube playlist.
The TRUTHS climate mission will be a calibration laboratory in space, decreasing uncertainty of Earth Observation data collected by satellites by up to 10 times. It is a European Space Agency (ESA) mission, conceived by the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and led by the UK Space Agency, in partnership with Switzerland, Greece, the Czech … Continue reading “TRUTHS – Breakthrough Mission for Climate Data”
MicroCarb will measure atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2), determining emissions of carbon across the globe with extreme precision, even down to city level. This joint venture by the UK Space Agency and Centre National D’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) will allow scientists to determine how much carbon is being absorbed and emitted by natural processes and how much … Continue reading “MicroCarb – Carbon Dioxide data for the Global Stocktake”
Launched in late 2022, and currently in the calibration and validation phase, SWOT will provide images of Earth’s oceans, lakes, rivers and wetlands in higher resolution than ever before, revolutionising global assessments of water resources on land. Opportunities the SWOT mission will offer The high resolution sea surface height maps and data provided by SWOT … Continue reading “SWOT: Surface Water and Ocean Topography Satellite”
Space4Climate has produced this set of satellite mission explainers as a handy briefing on upcoming UK-involved climate satellite missions. These accessible guides have been designed to give an overview of the UK expertise contributing to each one as well as the potential of the data they will return. Including the same sets of information for … Continue reading “Mission explainers now available”
Dr Chris Holloway from the University of Reading takes a look at how satellite data improvements for your daily weather forecast can be used for climate action and explains why satellite missions launched now secure scientific capability for future generations.
TRUTHS: A climate mission conceived by the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) to track climate change more accurately from space. It is being developed by ESA on behalf of the UK Space Agency and other partner nations across Europe to track climate change more accurately from space.
Ground-breaking French-UK climate change satellite mission showcases the UK’s world-leading carbon Earth observation capability.
BIOMASS is the first satellite that will study the world’s forests in 3-dimensions using a P-band tomographic radar.