France, April 29 -- The Airbus built forest monitoring satellite Biomass has been successfully launched into orbit. A European Space Agency (ESA) flagship mission, Biomass will use its revolutionary P-band synthetic aperture radar instrument to measure forest biomass to assess terrestrial carbon stocks and fluxes to enable scientists to better understand the carbon cycle and its effects on climate change.Launched on a Vega-C rocket from Europe's Space Port, Kourou, French Guiana, the satellite will scan the Earth's forests from an altitude of 666km during its five-year mission.An ESA Earth Explorer mission, Biomass carries the first space-borne P-band radar, to deliver exceptionally accurate maps of tropical, temperate and boreal forest bio...