ESA Envisat services interrupted

Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) captured this image on 8 April 2012 at 13:05 CEST. 

The image was transmitted in Ka-band to ESA/ESRIN though direct transmission via Artemis, the ESA Data Relay satellite.

The image, which is of nominal quality, shows Portugal and Spain. 

It is the last Envisat data transmitted via Ka-band before the communication anomaly affected the Envisat satellite.

Credits: ESA

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 8 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.

ESA’s mission control team declared a spacecraft emergency and immediately called for support from additional ESA tracking stations around the world. A team of operations and flight dynamics specialists and engineers was quickly assembled.

In a concerted effort, the recovery team, which included experts from industry, spent the next days trying to re-establish communications with the satellite.

While it is known that Envisat remains in a stable orbit around Earth, efforts to resume contact with the satellite have, so far, not been successful.

As is standard practice, an anomaly review board is investigating the cause for the break in communications.

Envisat has exceeded its planned life of five years by far. Since it was launched in 2002, this remarkable satellite has orbited Earth more than 50 000 times delivering thousands of images and a wealth of data to study and understand our changing planet, establishing itself as a landmark success in observing Earth from space.

As the world’s most complex Earth observation satellite, Envisat carries 10 sophisticated instruments that have provided key information about our land, oceans, ice and atmosphere. Combined with data from the ERS missions since 1991, Envisat has provided precise measurements on climate change over the last 20 years.

More than 4000 projects in over 70 countries have been supported with Envisat data. Data in the archives will continue to be available for users.

A contingency agreement with the Canadian Space Agency on Radarsat will be activated to allow a continuity in service. This will allow contracts to be served to some of the user requirements, if the problem with Envisat persists.