Just five days after launch

Apr 13, 2010 12:55 GMT  ·  By
The CryoSat mission is dedicated to monitoring of the changes in the thickness of marine ice floating in the polar oceans and thickness variations on the ice sheets that overlay Greenland and Antarctica.
   The CryoSat mission is dedicated to monitoring of the changes in the thickness of marine ice floating in the polar oceans and thickness variations on the ice sheets that overlay Greenland and Antarctica.

Experts at the European Space Agency (ESA) announce that one of their control centers has already begun receiving the first datasets from the newly-launched CryoSat-2 satellite. The instrument took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, on April 8, and its managers say that it has performed beautifully during the critical stage of the mission. In most satellite launches, the first few days of operations are absolutely critical. Just hours after mission experts turned on the sophisticated radars aboard the spacecraft, they began receiving back telemetry, the ESA team says.

Only a few minutes after being launched last Thursday, the satellite was inserted by its Dnepr delivery system into a polar orbit above Earth. For the next three days, researchers working from the European Space Operations Center (ESOC), in Germany, monitored the payload and health status of the satellite around the clock. The goal was to ensure that everything was fairing along nicely and that no damage had come to either the satellite or its cargo during the harsh conditions of lift-off.

“The satellite is in excellent condition and the mission operations team quickly resolved the few problems that came up. It's been a very smooth entry into orbit, precisely as planned,” said on April 11 Pier Paolo Emanuelli, the Flight Director of ESA. He also announced at the time that the Launch and Early Orbit Phase (LEOP) of the mission had concluded successfully. The main instrument on CryoSat-2, called the Synthetic Aperture Interferometric Radar Altimeter (SIRAL), was turned on late Sunday, and it immediately began picking up echo data from the ground.

The ESA Kiruna ground station picked up on the spacecraft's telemetry shortly afterwards. The first data were collected and processed on-site, before being shipped out to ESA. “We switched SIRAL on and it worked beautifully from the very start. Our first data were taken over the Antarctic's Ross Ice Shelf, and clearly show the ice cover and reflections from underlying layers. These are excellent results at such an early stage and are a tribute to the hard work of the entire CryoSat community,” said the lead investigator of the CryoSat-2 mission, professor Duncan Wingham.

“The combined ground teams proved the value of months of extensive training and preparation and the satellite has shown to be a high-quality machine with very few problems. The launch and orbit injection have been almost flawless and we are looking forward to an extremely productive mission,” concluded the ESA project manager for the mission, Richard Francis.