Disaster as climate probe crashes




'This is a tragedy for all the scientists who have spent years putting together this mission,' said Volker Liebeg, head of the European Space Agency's Earth Observation division.

The evening of the launch had appeared, initially, to be going well when, at 4.02pm, the probe was blasted into the upper atmosphere on an old Soviet SS-19 ballistic missile from Plesetsk Cosmodrome, outside Archangel in northern Russia. But 90 minutes later, when the probe was supposed to fly back over Europe after making its first orbit round the Earth, mission control staff found they could not pick signals from the satellite.

The celebratory party looked on in baffled silence as mission control staff tried in vain to pick up data either from CryoSat or from the mission's third stage booster rocket.

At first Esa engineers tried to convince themselves that CryoSat - which was expected to provide the clearest picture yet of what climate change is doing to our planet - might still be circulating Earth on an incorrect orbit. It could have failed to detach itself from its third stage booster or could have been sent spiralling in low orbit round Earth, they argued. Desperate efforts using military antennae networks were instigated to find the probe.

Several hours later the truth emerged. The second stage of the Russians' SS-19 rocket had failed to separate from its third stage and the whole assembly, including its satellite, had plunged into the Arctic Ocean.

Losing CryoSat is a bitter setback for climate science, particularly as it was constructed on a shoestring budget - which means that no engineering back-up model was built.