This week's scheduled launch of a European satellite designed to monitor the response of icesheets to climate change has now been delayed by technical concerns, the European Space Agency (ESA) stated last Friday. CryoSat-2 had been scheduled to be launched from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan this Thursday — however, the operation "has been delayed due to a concern related to the second stage steering engine of the Dnepr launcher," ESA said in a press release.

Although the fuel supply of the second stage engine should be sufficient to get CryoSat into orbit, the fuel reserve is not as large as they would like it to be, according to the Ukrainian company Yuzhnoye, who developed and is responsible for the launcher. CryoSat-2 is a replica of a first satellite which was lost through a second-stage launch failure in October 2005 that used a modified Russian SS-19 intercontinental ballistic missile as the launch vehicle. The Dnepr is a three-stage derivation of an SS-18 ICBM. The 700-kilo (1,540-pound) satellite carries an all-weather microwave radar altimeter designed to measure changes in the thickness of floating sea ice and land ice sheets to within one centimetre (0.4 of an inch). The CryoSat-2 is to be the third of ESA's Earth Explorer satellites. The others are GOCE, which was launched in March 2009 to monitor ocean circulation, and SMOS, launched in November of 2009 to monitor soil moisture and ocean salinity.