Posted on 10/08/2005 11:07:37 PM PDT by neverdem
MOSCOW, Oct. 8 (Agence France-Presse) - A European satellite that was to have helped scientists understand global warming by scanning the thickness of polar ice sheets crashed into the Arctic Ocean on Saturday after its Russian launcher failed, officials said.
The $170 million Cryosat satellite blasted off from the northwestern Plesetsk cosmodrome atop a Russian-built Rockot launch vehicle, a converted Soviet-era SS-19 ballistic missile, but failed to achieve orbit, Vyacheslav Davidenko, a spokesman for the Russian Space Agency, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
The European Space Agency official in charge of the project, Pascal Gilles, said engineers and scientists had worked five to six years on the satellite. The space agency was expected to make an announcement on Monday on what steps it would take regarding the Cryosat, which was the first of six "Earth Explorer" satellites designed to explore key environmental problems.
The 1,564-pound Cryosat was to have scanned the thickness of polar ice sheets and floating sea ice to an unprecedented accuracy.
Satellite data suggests that this ice cover has been shrinking at around 3 percent per year since the 1970's, although information about its thickness - a critical factor in how serious the problem could be - remains sketchy.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list. Anyone can post any unrelated link as they see fit.
Bwahahahahaha!!!!!!!!
There goes another damn hole in the ozone!
I wonder how much of the bird flue is just hype? Is it for real or not?
If people had crystal balls that really worked, they would be quite rich.
OH, I get it. They just have to make their best guess on what virus is going to spread each year. Just like they make their best guess what virus strains they should put in the flu shots. Always wondered how they chose the strains to put in the vaccine.
Global warming caused it to crash.
damn halliburton SAMs! Its Bush's fault
OK Sooooo, if we use an overall average and say the ice was 10 klicks (just a guess I have no clue what the ice thickness is) thick in 1970 then that would mean now the ice is approximately 3.443 klicks thick and would of course show a steady decline in the rate of ice cover loss?
So things should be looking up right?
So things should be looking up right?
No, the reporting is awful, the assumption is flaky, i.e. global warming is anthropogenic(caused by man), and they're trying to use fear to manipulate behavior. I'm not unhappy that the satellite went into the drink.
The melting of polar ice formations may cause sea levels to rise, but ice is less dense than water(that's why it floats), so that when floating ice melts, the liquid volume will be less. Antarctic and other glaciers that melt are not the same, except that they seem to act like Mars Emerging from Ice Age, Data Suggest.
The world may be warming; but, IMO, Scientists have about as much a clue about why as they did about bleeding people to get the bad blood out... They have zero business talking about it until they have some clue what they're talking about. So far, not one of them has demonstrated anything other than the ability to label something they don't understand and then act like they're experts on the subject inspite of the lack of any evidence or understanding of it. Science seems to have gotten so lazy and used to just saying whatever it will on any given subject and stating their theories as fact that they don't much even bother with knowing what the heck they're talking about till they've pontificated it to death. IMO, they should have kept their pie holes shut till they'd done the research. We know more about Global warming right now - knowing nothing - than the scientists individually know. One wonders if "global warming" might as well be a religion, given that there is more dogma there than facts to base the dogmas upon. At least someone was bothering doing some science instead of jaw flapping... Next time, perhaps they can get a ride that makes it to orbit..
Knowing its sponsors and its mission, it committed suicide.
Darn. Now we'll never know. < /sarc >
<< Arctic Study Satellite Crashes Into Ocean >>
Gee whiz.
Trust it cooled down first.
[But then again, it's fall and there's lots of lovely new Arctic ice to absorb its heat]
Praise be! During the Cold War years we lived in fear of those Soviet rockets, and now they can't even launch a Euro satellite.
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