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Europe’s ice-measuring CryoSat-2 has just been hefted up skywards, some five years after its predecessor was destroyed shortly after launching.

“This time the launcher worked beautifully,” said Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA’s Director General. “I would like to say to the scientists now the satellite is yours.”

If all goes well, CryoSat-2 should end up some 700 km up, following its successful launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

“CryoSat-2 gives us a new pair of eyes on what is happening to Earth’s ice. The changes in the cryosphere are providing the most unequivocal evidence that we are changing our planet in ways that should concern us all,” Robert Bindschadler of NASA’s Hydrospheric and Biospheric Sciences Laboratory told Nature News last month.

For more see: Space probe set to size up polar ice.

UPDATE

“We know from our radar satellites that sea ice extent is diminishing, but there is still an urgent need to understand how the volume of ice is changing,” says Volker Liebig, ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes (press release).

“To make these calculations, scientists also need information on ice thickness, which is exactly what our new CryoSat satellite will provide. We are now very much looking forward to receiving the first data from the mission.”