- News

With the commissioning of ESA's CryoSat now complete, the mission has been officially transferred to the operations team. This milestone marks the beginning of the satellite’s operational life delivering ice-thickness data to understand the impact of climate change on the polar environment.

Launched in April, the mission has recently completed commissioning – an important phase that ensures the satellite, instruments, data retrieval and data processing procedures are in optimal working order. Now that this period is over, the mission has entered its exploitation phase and will start delivering vital data on ice thickness to the scientific community.

The science team for CryoSat-2 is being led from the UK, with UCL’s Professor Duncan Wingham, Head of the UK’s Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC), serving as the missions lead investigator. Professor Wingham also led the team that wrote the original CryoSat proposal in 1998.

The mission is Europe's first mission dedicated to monitoring Earth's ice fields. The satellite carries a sophisticated radar altimeter that can measure the thickness of sea ice down to centimetres and also monitor changes in ice sheets, particularly around the edges where icebergs are calved from the vast ice sheets that cover Greenland and Antarctica.

Along with information on ice extent, these measurements on ice-thickness change will show how the volume of Earth's ice is changing and ultimately lead to a better understanding of the relationship between ice and climate change.

For more information on CryoSat-2 visit ESA's dedicated mission pages.

News article taken from the UK Space Agency website.

For dedicated teaching resources related to climate change visit the eLibrary.