CryoSat 2 Successfully Launches, Five Years After Failure Of First Ice-Measuring Bird - Independent

[hatrack]

A hi-tech European satellite designed to measure how fast the Earth's polar ice caps are melting was successfully launched into orbit yesterday, nearly five years after the first attempt at such a mission ended in spectacular failure.

CryoSat-2, which was designed and built in France and Germany but masterminded by British scientists, blasted off on a Russian launcher rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan shortly before 3pm yesterday afternoon. Some time later, a tracking station in Africa picked up the satellite's signal, confirming that it had gone into orbit.

It was a far cry from the last attempt in October 2005, when the original £100m CryoSat was lost after an apparently successful launch, when the Russian rocket failed to separate from its third stage, and the whole assembly, including its satellite, plunged into the Arctic Ocean – the very waters whose icy secrets CryoSat had been designed to uncover.

Yesterday there was jubilation among the scientists of the European Space Agency (ESA) who tracked the launch from the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany. "If anything, this mission is even more important now than a decade ago when we first proposed it, as changes in the Earth's polar ice sheets are accelerating," said Professor Duncan Wingham of University College London, CryoSat's principal investigator and the man behind the whole enterprise.

EDIT

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/satellite-blasts-off-on-mission-to-map-the-earths-melting-ice-1939864.html

[phantom power]

1. Looking forward to data from that bird.