Making ESA’s Biomass mission come alive

On 29 April 2025, ESA’s Biomass satellite began its journey to understand the role that the world’s forests play in the carbon cycle, aboard a Vega‑C rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. In the months leading up to liftoff, ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt became a vibrant hive of activity. As Europe's centre of excellence for satellite operations, ESOC is home to the engineering teams that control spacecraft in orbit, manage our global tracking station network, and design and build the systems on the ground that support missions in space. 

In the months before Biomass’s launch, a “team of teams” of more than one hundred people gathered here for the ritual exercise that precedes every launch: the simulation campaign. Engineers, scientists, and industry partners trained together through intensive simulations, rehearsing every step of the satellite’s critical first moments in space. Once fully prepared, Mission Control was GO for launch.