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”

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.