spacetoday.net: ESA declares Envisat lost

Posted: Thu, May 10, 2012, 11:02 AM ET (1502 GMT)
Envisat illustration (ESA)

The European Space Agency said Wednesday it was declaring the end of the mission for its Envisat earth sciences satellite, more than a month after contract was lost with the spacecraft. ESA lost contact with the ten-year-old spacecraft on April 8, and subsequent efforts to restore communications with the satellite have failed. ESA even obtained photos of the satellite from a French high-resolution imagery satellite, which showed no obvious signs of damage that could be causing the outage. While ESA has declared the spacecraft's mission over, engineers will spend the next two months on additional efforts to restore contact, acknowledging that the odds of success are low. Envisat launched in 2002 on a five-year mission, although ESA officials had hoped to keep the spacecraft operating until the launch of the first next-generation Sentinel spacecraft in 2013.