CryoSat, a European satellite launched to study the phenomenon of global warming, crashed into the Arctic Ocean on Saturday after its launcher malfunctioned, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.
The satellite, which was built over a period of six years, was meant to study the thickness of polar ice sheets and the speed of their melting. It was the first of the six 'Earth Explorer' satellites that constituted a program to study major environmental challenges facing Earth.
On Saturday at 1500 GMT, the CryoSat satellite was launched from Russia's Plesetsk Cosmodrome atop Rokot, a SS-19-ballistic-missile-turned-launcher. However, one stage of the rocket's booster system malfunctioned, resulting in the satellite crashing.
“The booster unit did not switch on and it resulted in the failure of the satellite to reach orbit. The remnants of the satellite have fallen into the northern Arctic Sea,” said Vyacheslav Davydenko, a Russian Federal Space Agency spokesman. Earlier, when scientists monitoring the satellite couldn't receive data from CryoSat, they thought it had wandered off into an orbit different from the one it was supposed to enter. However, it was later understood that the second stage failed to separate from the third stage of the satellite and the malfunction occurred.
“The confirmation we have is that there has been a failure and that ... the satellite with part of the launcher has fallen into the sea,” said Franco Bonacina, a spokesman for the ESA.
CryoSat, which weighed 1,564 pound, was built at the cost of about US$ 170 million. It was equipped with a hi-tech radar altimeter capable of measuring the height and angle of the polar ice sheets accurately. The measurements of the radar altimeter were to evaluate if the changes occurring in the ice sheets were because of global warming or because the winds that moved the ice around were showing modifications.
Understandably, the development met with disappointment in the weather research fraternity. Another ESA spokesman, Volker Liebeg said, “This is a tragedy for all the scientists who have spent years putting together this mission.”
"It is a very sad event for many scientists around Europe and also for the teams involved in industry which built the satellite,” said Duncan Wingham, the chief scientist of CryoSat. Wingham, a scientist from the Natural Environment Research Council's center for polar observation and modeling in Swindon, had designed the satellite. “It seems fairly clear that the second stage of the rocket failed and didn't make it into orbit and came back down. It has not been a good night. A thousand man years of work and 90 million pounds have gone into it,” he added. According to Wingham, now it might take another few years to launch a similar satellite.
