Europe's ice mission finally gets a launch date

It looks like the European Space Agency will finally get the delayed phase 1 (which has become phase 3) of their six phase Earth Explorers progamme launched. Meet CryoSat-2  (number one {that was once phase 1} was lost when the stage 2 rocket failed to separate from stage 1)... erm, here's the story

It was supposed to be a trailblazer, the first in a series of ‘Earth Explorers’ designed to measure and monitor the whole spectrum of processes that drive our climate. The European Space Agency’s CryoSat was going to measure, in unprecedented detail, the marine ice of the polar oceans and the ice fields of Greenland to give us, once and for all, a quantifiable measurement of their decline that even the most rabid ‘climategate’ exploiters wouldn’t be able to deny.

Unfortunately, a launch failure saw the craft (and the rocket section to which it was still attached) plunge back to Earth and into a premature watery grave.
The project was deemed to be so important – and the information it could provide so urgent – that, in just four months, the ESA had commissioned the construction of a facsimile mission. Now, four and a half years later, its successor – the slightly improved and logically named CryoSat-2 – is set for launch on April 8.
However, the delay between the two missions has seen the goal posts move somewhat. The original CryoSat was designed to test the theory that Arctic ice was indeed declining but this point has been rendered moot as, since then, we have seen record lows in Arctic summer sea ice. CryoSat-2’s mission will be to determine what the consequences of that ice loss will be and how they will be felt across the globe.

To those of us lucky enough to live further south than polar bears, the fate of the Arctic’s ice might seem a bit sad – especially for those cuddly old animals – but not of enormous concern in our everyday lives. However, one consequence of a loss of surface ice is that circulation patterns at the oceans’ surface might be affected, which could, in turn, have a wider effect on the deep-sea ‘conveyor belt’ that carries cold water from the poles to the equator and back again.

From an altitude of 700km, CryoSat-2 will precisely monitor (to within the centimetre) changes in the thickness of the polar ice sheets both on land and at sea, significantly adding to the information gleaned from previous missions. But the craft is just one piece in a jigsaw of ESA missions called the Earth Explorer programme. CryoSat-2 will be the third – of the eventual six – core missions to be launched. The first, launched in March 2009, is a gravity mapper called GOCE. The second, known as SMOS, was launched last November and is tasked with measuring soil moisture levels and ocean salinity.
Still to come are missions designed to measure the Earth’s magnetic field, its cloud cover and global winds.

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