Ice explorer 'disappears'

2005-10-08 20:04

Moscow - Russian and European engineers lost contact with a Russian rocket carrying a European Space Agency satellite on Saturday, some two hours after it blasted off from a northern base and failed to reach orbit.

ESA spokesperson Franco Bonacina said the CryoSat satellite was supposed to reach orbit at around 16:30 GMT - about one hour after launch - but Russian and European flight controllers had had no contact with it.

"For the time being, we have no contact with the satellite," he said, speaking by telephone from the Plesetsk launch facility in northern Russia.

"We have had no confirmation on separation yet," he said. "We're trying to figure out exactly what happened."

He said there were European tracking stations, as well as the Russian flight controllers, looking for the satellite, and he said there were several more chances in the coming hours when the satellite could be located.

Vikor Remichevsky, deputy director of the Russian Federal Space Agency, was quoted as saying by the Itar-Tass news agency, that there had been "a failure of the navigation system".

The satellite was launched aboard a converted intercontinental ballistic missile at about 15:02 GMT.

The satellite is slated to spend three years surveying polar ice, using radar altimeters to assess the kilometres-thick ice sheets that cover Greenland and the Antarctic land mass and the comparatively thin sea ice in the polar regions.

On the net:

www.esa.int

- AP