"The story of climate change is closely tied to that of the carbon cycle. The increasing amounts of carbon dioxide hanging in our atmosphere — as opposed to being locked up in the world's oceans, soils, and forests — are leading to broken heat records and scary predictions of what our world might look like without ice sheets.

To better understand how big a role trees play in this carbon cycle, NASA has recently granted a spot aboard the International Space Station to an instrument to measure the carbon in Earth's forests.

The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation lidar, or GEDI (pronounced "Jedi", à la Star Wars) will determine the total volume of trees on Earth, and analyze how that figure might have changed over time. That's juicy data, because fully half of a tree's dry weight is carbon.

'If you were to cut the tree down, let it dry out and weigh it, half of its biomass that's there is carbon,' Ralph Dubayah, of the University of Maryland, College Park, told Business Insider.

The university designed GEDI, which will be built (at a cost of $94 million) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center a few miles away. The instrument will make its way to space in 2018."