CryoSat

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CryoSat was an ESA satellite that was destroyed on launch October 8, 2005 when the second stage engine of a modified Russian SS-19 ICBM did not cut-off as planned.^[1]^[2] CryoSat was proposed in 1998 by Duncan Wingham of University College London. The satellite's planned three year mission was to survey natural and human driven changes in the cryosphere on Earth. It was designed to provide much more accurate data on the rate of change of the surface elevation of the polar ice sheets and sea ice thickness.

CryoSat was to have been operated from the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany.

[edit] Description

CryoSat's primary instrument was SIRAL (SAR / Interferometric Radar Altimeter). SIRAL would operate in one of three modes, depending on where (above the Earth's surface) CryoSat was flying. Over the oceans and ice sheet interiors, CryoSat would have operated like a traditional radar altimeter. Over sea ice, coherently transmitted echoes would have been combined (synthetic aperture processing) to reduce the surface footprint so that CryoSat could map smaller ice floes. CryoSat's most advanced mode would have been used around the ice sheet margins and over mountain glaciers. Here, the altimeter would have performed synthetic aperture processing and used a second antenna as an interferometer to determine the across-track angle to the earliest radar return. This would have provided the exact surface location being measured when the surface is sloping.

For positioning purposes, CryoSat included a DORIS receiver, a laser retroreflector and three star trackers.

The ERS-1 and ERS-2 satellites were precursors that tested the techniques used by CryoSat.

[edit] Launch failure

CryoSat was launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia, using a Rockot launcher. (Rockot is a modified SS-19 rocket which was originally an ICBM designed to deliver nuclear weapons, but which Russia is now eliminating in accordance with the START treaties.) According to Mr. Yuri Bakhvalov, First Deputy Director General of the Khrunichev Space Centre, when the automatic command to switch off the second stage engine did not take effect, the second stage continued to operate until it ran out of fuel and as a consequence the planned separation of the third (Breeze-KM) stage of the rocket which carried the CryoSat satellite did not take place, and would thus have remained attached to the second stage. The upper rocket stages together with the satellite probably crashed in the Lincoln Sea.

Analysis of the error revealed that it was caused by faults in the programming of the rocket, which had not been detected in simulations.^[3]

[edit] CryoSat II

After the launch failure of CryoSat, ESA immediately started to see if it was possible to find funding for re-flying the CryoSat mission. Due to the importance of the scientific goals of this satellite, there was enormous support for this, and the initial phases for CryoSat-II were approved when ESA agreed to build a copy of the spacecraft on February 23, 2006^[4]. The current target launch date for CryoSat-II is 2009.