ESA and NASA together for CRYO2ICE mission
ESA’s CryoSat-2 and NASA’s ICESat-2 satellites will launch the CRYO2ICE mission, a joint project between the two space agencies that will involve orbit synchronization.
Combining efforts will bring enormous scientific benefits to the study of polar regions, providing radar and laser data from the same areas, simultaneously and complementarily.
With a decade of work in the skies, CryoSat was launched by the European space agency to measure changes in the height of the Earth’s ice and reveal how climate change is affecting polar regions.
CryoSat was designed to observe two types of ice: the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets that lie on the ground and the sea ice that floats in the polar oceans. In addition to the different impacts to the planet of these types of ice, there are also different challenges when trying to measure their thickness.
The ICESat-2 was launched in 2018 to measure the elevation of the ice sheet and the thickness of the sea ice, as well as the topography and vegetation characteristics with its laser and precise detection instruments.
