The UK Space Agency will invest £9 million in an early-stage technology programme to better understand how space can be used to understand and protect the planet.

The funding, delivered by the Centre for Earth Observation Instrumentation (CEOI), will support 12 projects which monitor the earth’s atmosphere and measure emissions such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen dioxide.

The government said the new investment is double the programme’s previous largest funding round, with funding further boosted by more than £2 million added by the academic and private sectors.

Projects receiving funding include CITISCAN, which aims to develop instruments to measure aerosols like nitrogen dioxide in real-time in urban areas.

Another project called CAITDM aims to fill gaps in the understanding of the upper atmosphere using a cold-atom accelerometer to measure spatial and temporal fluctuations.

“This additional funding from the UK Space Agency demonstrates its continued support for the development of high-end remote-sensing technologies,” said Nicolas Leveque, director of the CEOI. “These technologies will fill many gaps in our observing capabilities and help better understand some of the more complex processes driving the Earth climate and environment.”

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