The UK will construct a new satellite to track natural disasters and the climate crisis.

A new spacecraft that will assist scientists in monitoring the climate crisis and natural disasters will be built and funded in part by the UK.

The UK Space Agency will contribute £3 million to the new pathfinder satellite, which will join Spain and Portugal in the €80 million (£70 million) Atlantic Constellation project. Co-funding will be provided by Oxfordshire-based Open Cosmos, which has its main office at the Harwell campus.

The goal of the project is to build a constellation of satellites that will monitor Earth and hopefully provide “valuable and regularly updated data” to aid in the detection, tracking, and mitigation of natural disaster risk.

Earth observation will be crucial in addressing global issues like climate change and disaster relief, according to Andrew Griffith, a minister in the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology. It will provide the necessary data quickly and will support important UK industries like agriculture and energy.

The announcement was made four weeks after Tim Peake, the last British astronaut to fly into space, declared he would leave retirement to take command of the country’s first astronaut mission. The UK Space Conference is being held in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on the opening day. Peake, 51, was an astronaut for the European Space Agency and made her most recent trip to the International Space Station in 2015.

Four astronauts from Britain will be participating in the mission. It is being carried out by the UK Space Agency under an agreement with the American company Axiom Space, which arranges trips to the International Space Station. It is anticipated that the project will require £200 million, to which the British taxpayer will not contribute.

“It is a great thing that the UK is leading this new phase of commercial exploration; there is a lot going on in the space sector right now,” Peake stated last month in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “It is a very exciting development,” Peake continued.

The financial model must be established, the crew must be chosen and trained, NASA must approve the mission, and they must determine a slot if the mission is to go to the International Space Station, he continued.