The European Space Agency is considering rebuilding its lost CryoSat satellite, which crashed into the Arctic Ocean on Saturday after the failure of its launch vehicle.
CryoSat was designed to measure the thickness of polar ice sheets and floating sea ice to an unprecedented level of accuracy, providing valuable new data to climate scientists. But it was lost when its Rockot launcher, built by a German and Russian joint venture called Eurockot, failed shortly after launch from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in north-west Russia.
The problem appears to lie with the rocket's second stage. It failed to shut off as planned and did not separate from the vehicle's upper stage, causing the satellite and conjoined stages to splash into the ocean north of Greenland.
Russia, ESA and Eurockot are investigating the cause of the failure.
But ESA is already considering a replacement mission. "We're looking into this option seriously in order to please the worldwide science community," says ESA spokesperson Simonetta Cheli.
Money will be a key factor in the decision to rebuild. The original mission cost €136 million, which included the development of the €70 million satellite, ground support, the launch and operations for three years. But Volker Liebig, the director of ESA's Earth Observation programme, says: "A clone of the original CryoSat should be less expensive."
Tight schedule
ESA is negotiating with industry to estimate the cost of building a clone and talking to Eurockot about launching it at a reduced fee. But any replacement must also be authorised by ESA's member states, which provide money for particular missions.
If CryoSat II gets that support, Liebig estimates the mission would take three years to launch. "The design phase has been done once and we would only have to go through manufacturing and testing," he says.
Such a tight schedule is feasible if no changes are made to the mission design, says ESA's Don McCoy. He is the project manager for Venus Express, which ESA developed in three years and based on its existing Mars Express spacecraft.
"They won't have much flexibility," McCoy told New Scientist. "The basic building of the instruments takes a certain amount of time, and then you need to test everything together in the spacecraft."
Cutting edge
The downside of simply cloning the original is that the second satellite cannot take advantage of any technological advances developed since the first mission was designed. But McCoy says: "If they have an instrument that hasn't flown and isn't planned to be flown by anybody else in the future, it is still cutting edge for applications in space."
Liebig suggests this is the case, as CryoSat carries different instruments than NASA's IceSat satellite, which launched into orbit in January 2003. IceSat uses a laser to measure the topography of ice at the poles, while CryoSat was to employ a highly precise radar altimeter to measure ice thickness.
If a second CryoSat mission were launched, it would be the latest in a series of repeats undertaken by both ESA and NASA. In 2000, ESA successfully launched its Cluster II mission aboard two Soyuz rockets - a group of four spacecraft designed to study the magnetic environment around Earth. The original group had been destroyed in 1996 when their Ariane 5 launcher broke apart 37 seconds after liftoff.
And NASA is planning to launch its Phoenix probe to the Red Planet in 2007. Phoenix uses instruments from the agency's Mars Polar Lander, which crashed onto the planet in 1999.
