Satellite destroyed after launch

Satellite destroyed after launch: "AP - A European Space Agency satellite that was to have gathered data on polar ice has broken up in flight and its remnants have crashed into the ocean, a Russian space agency official said.

'The remnants of the satellite have fallen into the northern Arctic Sea,' Vyacheslav Davydenko, a spokesman for the Russian Federal Space Agency, told The Associated Press.

'The booster unit did not switch on and it resulted in the failure of the satellite to reach orbit,' he said.

Engineers lost contact with the Russian rocket carrying the ESA's CryoSat satellite about two hours after it blasted off from Russia's northern Plesetsk launch facility, Franco Bonacina, a spokesman for the European Space Agency, told AP.

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He said the CryoSat satellite was supposed to reach orbit at around 8:30 pm (0230 AEST Sunday), but by 8:50 pm Russian and European flight controllers had had no contact with it.

'We're trying to figure out exactly what happened,' he said, speaking by telephone from the Plesetsk launch facility in northern Russia.

The satellite, which was launched aboard a converted intercontinental ballistic missile, was supposed to have spent three years surveying polar ice to help scientists gain a new understanding of global warming.

It was equipped with radar altimeters to assess the kilometres-thick ice sheets that cover Greenland and the Antarctic land mass and the comparatively thin sea ice in the polar regions."

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