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ESA bidrager til det internationale polarår   Vast expanse of ice sheet on Greenland  An enormous iceberg, C-16, rammed into the well-known Drygalski Ice Tongue, a large sheet of glacial ice and snow in the Central Ross Sea in Antarctica, on 30 March 2006, breaking off the tongue’s easternmost tip and forming a new iceberg. Envisat’s ASAR acquired these images in Wide Swath Mode (WSM), providing spatial resolution of 150 metres. ASAR can pierce through clouds and local darkness and is capable of differentiating between different types of ice.  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. Release date: 1 Marts 2007 |