The IceSAR-2012 campaign explored the potential of the Biomass mission to provide ice-sheet motion products and subsurface-structure maps. At the time of the campaign, Biomass was one of three candidate Earth Explorer 8 missions. In May 2013, it was selected to be developed. The mission is therefore now being designed to provide, for the first time from space, P-band radar measurements to determine the amount of biomass and carbon stored in forests with greater accuracy than ever before.
Although the P-band imaging synthetic aperture radar will map forest biomass, a number of scientific studies have shown long-wave radar may be very useful to monitor ice-sheet movement. Also, since P-band radar penetrates into the snow surface much more than other radar frequencies, images from Biomass could potentially provide a glimpse of ice structures beneath the surface. The IceSAR-2012 campaign was carried out on the Greenland icecap to explore these possibilities.