Envisat - Largest environmental Earth monitoring satellite goes dark

[sharon sanders]

Biggest environment satellite goes silent
(AFP) ? 10 hours ago
PARIS ? The European Space Agency said on Thursday it had lost contact with Envisat, the biggest Earth-monitoring satellite in history.

snip

Envisat's data has been used in 4,000 science projects in 70 countries, including landmark research into climate change.
Its study of ocean currents was used last year to simulate dispersal of nuclear pollution from the Fukushima accident, and it gained real-time images of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

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http://www.google.com/hostednews/af...ocId=CNG.1600874ddd4dd904143a6e703b2e58b3.d51

 

[JJackson]

Re: Envisat - Largest environmental Earth monitoring satellite goes dark

To lose such a major earth observation platform now, and the chances of re-establishing communication do not look good, is obviously very bad news.

Envisat was a 5 year program which has run for 10.
It is due for replacement by a swarm of smaller satellites called Sentinel for which there has been some launch date slippage. The first launches (3 satellites I think, but don't quote me on that) now due for 2013 however as each only carries a small - albeit advanced - subset of the range of instruments on Envisat it may be some time before some functions are restored. There are, of course, other earth observation platforms of overlapping capabilities and resolutions a list of which can be found here.
This link is to ESA's future missions section on the Sentinel 1 satellites and similar pages on others Sentinels are linked to in the box on the right.
ESA's 'latest mission news' page for Envisat is here but sadly its latest entry reads

Envisat services interrupted

12 April 2012


After 10 years of service, Envisat has stopped sending data to Earth. ESA's mission control is working to re-establish contact with the satellite.
Although this landmark mission has been in orbit twice as long as it was designed for, ESA hopes to keep the satellite in service until the launch of the successor Sentinel missions.
The first sign that there was a problem came on 08 April when contact with the satellite was unexpectedly lost, preventing the reception of any data as it passed over the Kiruna ground station in Sweden.

Thank you Envisat and get well soon, or if you can't RIP