CryoSat, the £100 million brainchild of UK climate expert Duncan Wingham, was supposed to survey the thinning of Earth's ice caps from space. Instead it plummeted into the Arctic Ocean at around 4.15pm.
The loss is a major blow for climate research - and for Europe's ambitions to become a major space power. Last night delegates, dignitaries, and senior scientists - who had gathered at Europe's Esrin space control centre in Frascati, Italy, to celebrate CryoSat's success - stood in grim huddles as they tried to digest the news of its fate...
Losing CryoSat is a bitter setback for climate science, particularly as it was constructed on a shoestring budget - which means that no engineering back-up model was built.
The idea was a great one in principle, but unfortunately even the best ideas can fail when there's a lack of commitment from the parties involved. Given the failure to so much as build a backup model, it's pretty clear there wasn't enough investment in CryoSat to make it a success.
While the shoestring budget may have seemed a good idea if the project had worked as planned, the end result is nothing short of disastrous. A large amount of money has been spent on a project with no positive results, which will likely lead to public cynicism as to the merits of any similar research. And we're still no more able to meet the goal of tracking the ice caps than we were before the project started.
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