Launch of European climate satellite is delayed

Agence France-Presse: The launch next week of a European satellite designed to monitor the response of icesheets to climate change has been delayed by a technical worry, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Friday. CryoSat-2 had been scheduled to be launched from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan next Thursday.

The operation "has been delayed due to a concern related to the second stage steering engine of the Dnepr launcher," ESA said in a press release. "Although the fuel supply of the second stage engine should be sufficient to get CryoSat into orbit, the fuel reserve is not as large as they would like it to be, according to the Ukrainian company Yuzhnoye, who developed and is responsible for the launcher.

…Kosmotras, the launch provider, will inform ESA of a new launch date shortly, it added. CryoSat-2 is a replica of a first satellite which was lost through a second-stage launch failure in October 2005 that used a modified Russian SS-19 intercontinental ballistic missile…..

SA Satellite Cryosat-2 at IABG testbed in Ottobrunn, shot by AndreasSchepers, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license