ESA’s seventh Earth Explorer mission, the BIOMASS mission, will provide crucial information about the state of our forests, how they are changing and the role they play in the global carbon cycle. This mission is designed to provide, for the first time from space, P-band Synthetic Aperture Radar measurements to determine the amount of biomass stored in forests. However, the novelty of BIOMASS’s sensors poses the challenges:

1. to develop scientific processing algorithms with limited calibration and validation data pre-launch;

2. for timely improvement and updating of operational BIOMASS algorithms with the mission launch in 2023;

3. to enable scientific community formation for rapid scientific discovery with BIOMASS generated data products.

The BIOMASS Product Algorithm Laboratory (BioPAL) is an open-source scientific computing project, supporting the development of ESA’s BIOMASS mission algorithms coded in Python. The goal of the BioPAL project is to bridge the gap between advancements in scientific algorithm development and fast integration of these advancements into ESA’s BIOMASS’s ground operations. It is the first time that an official ESA Earth Explorer operational processor is supported by open and collaborative development of processing algorithms within the scope of an open-source software project and community.