ESA - CryoSat - Norway acknowledges CryoSat as essential to help quantify our changing climate

CryoSat at a glance

An Earth Explorer CryoSat: an icy mission Earth’s changing ice Facts and figures

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Richard Francis - Project Manager Tommaso Parrinello - Mission Manager Duncan Wingham, Lead Investigator Klaus Köble, EADS Astrium Project Manager Mark Drinkwater, Mission Scientist Bill Simpson, Launch Campaign Manager Nic Mardle, Spacecraft Operations Manager Laurent Rey, Thales Alenia Space SIRAL Project Manager Malcolm Davidson, Validation Manager

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Norway acknowledges CryoSat as essential to help quantify our changing climate

18 October 2004

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Credits: Bjerknes Centre for Climate Rearch, Norway

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In this doucment, published in 1904, Vilhelm Bjerknes first proposed the procedure now known as numerical weather forecasting.

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Record summer minimum sea-ice extent in the Arctic (courtesy NSIDC), shown in white for September 2004. The pink line indicates the typical September monthly median ice extent, based on satellite records that began in the 1970’s.

Credits: NSIDC

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Artist's impression of CryoSat in orbit over southern Greenland ice sheet.

The launch of the CryoSat spacecraft was unfortunately aborted on 8 October 2005 due to a malfunction of its Rockot launcher, which resulted in the total loss of the spacecraft.

At the latest meeting of the European Space Agency's Earth Observation Programme Board, which took place at ESA’s Headquarters in Paris on 23 and 24 February 2006, ESA received the green light from its Member States to build and launch a CryoSat recovery mission, CryoSat-2.

Credits: ESA/AOES Medialab

Primary instrument is delivered for ESA's CryoSat mission Scientists confront the challenges of the Arctic in support of ESA's ice mission