A team of students from the Climate Change College was using Inmarsat‘s Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN), system to maintain contact with headquarters and loved ones during a 10-day expedition on the Greenland Ice Sheet.

The team, participating in the European Space Agency‘s (ESA) Cryosat validation experiment, set up camp on the ice and was assisting with experiments that will be used to validate results from the Cryosat mission. Ground measurements made by the students will be compared with those obtained from an aircraft carrying the ASIRAS radar altimeter to simulate Cryosat measurements. Cryosat-2 is expected to be launched in March 2009 to monitor precise changes in the thickness of the polar ice sheets and floating sea ice to help determine whether global climate change is causing the polar ice caps to shrink.

Cryosat-2 will replace the Cryosat spacecraft that was destroyed in October when its Russian Rockot spacecraft suffered a second state engine failure.

The team, which stayed on the ice sheet from May 3 through May 10, used BGAN to stay in touch with media organizations around the world by phone, e-mail and video link and also to update their Web logs.

Inmarsat provided free use the Inmarsat-4 F2 satellite and Radio Holland loaned the expedition a BGAN terminal manufactured by Hughes. Inmarsat-4 F2, located at 53 degrees West, became operational in late April. The spacecraft is the second satellite designed to support Inmarsat’s BGAN services. Inmarsat 4- F1 was placed into orbit in March 2005. A third satellite, Inmarsat-4 F3, is serving as a backup if either of the first two fails.

The satellites carry a single global beam that covers as much as one-third of the Earth’s surface plus 19 wide spot beams and 228 narrow spot beams. BGAN delivers Internet and intranet content, video-on-demand, videoconferencing, fax, e-mail, phone and local area network access at speeds as fast as 500 kilobits per second to BGAN terminals.