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Space mission that maps forests in 3D makes an early comeback

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Call it the force’s doing, but it has been surprises galore for the GEDI mission. In early 2023, the lidar mission that maps the Earth’s forests in 3D was to be burned up in the atmosphere to make way for another unrelated mission on the International Space Station. A last-minute decision by NASA saved its life and put it on hiatus until October 2024. Earlier this year, another surprise revealed itself: the mission that replaced GEDI was done with its work, effectively allowing GEDI to get back to work six months earlier than expected. That’s how, in April, a robotic arm ended up moving the GEDI mission (short for Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation and pronounced “Jedi” like in the Star Wars films) from storage on the ISS to its original location, from where it now continues to gather crucial data on aboveground biomass on Earth. “We may have up to a whole decade-long period of observations where we’ve observed the structure of the forest changing from 2018 to 2030,” Ralph Dubayah, principal investigator at GEDI, told Mongabay in a video interview. “We’ve never had anything like that before and it will be a remarkable data set.” Data from GEDI have been critical for scientists and ecologists to understand and track aboveground biomass. It helps them estimate the amount of carbon stored in forests around the world. Since half of a tree’s dry weight is carbon, scientists use the data to gauge how much carbon is released into the atmosphere when…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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