UPDATE: CyroSat-2 launch is A-OK. --- The European Space Agency (ESA) will make another attempt, the second one in five years, on Thursday, April 8, 2010, to launch its CryoSat-2 satellite aboard a Dnepr rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the desert steppes of Kazakhstan, (BBC).
CryoSat-2 will be put on a polar orbit with the altitude of 720 kilometres. The satellite is meant for high-precision measurements of the thickness and size of the ice shell of Antarctica, Greenland and Iceland, ice in circumpolar oceanic zones and highland glaciers. The satellite weighs 650 kilometres. That would be the third satellite launched by the ESA under the Live Planet program.
CryoSat-2 success over the next few years could aid scientists not only in Earth climate studies but those yet to come at the Jupiter moon Europa where the world is covered in ice but not fully understood due to the vast distance from Earth observation.
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