Equipped with a remarkable radar to monitor the thickness of the polar icecaps, the 140-million-euro (170-million-dollar) European Space Agencysatellite was lost shortly after launch on Saturday aboard a converted ballistic missile from Plesetsk, northern Russia.

Preliminary investigations point to a failure in the rocket's final stage, which was designed to boost satellite into orbit, ITAR-TASS news agency said on Sunday. The final stage and payload fell into the Lincoln Sea, near the North Pole.

"This is a big loss for ESA's Earth Explorer Programme," said Volker Liebig, ESA's director of Earth Observation.

"Europe and the worldwide scentific community will not be able to rely on such data from the CryoSat mission and will not be able to improve their knowledge of ice, especially sea ice and its impact on climate change," he said in a press release.

The satellite was "a little jewel, with exceptional measurement accuracy," CryoSat's mission chief, Pascal Gilles, told AFP. It had taken three years to build.

"It's a blow, there's no way of avoiding it, it's a big disappointment," CryoSat's chief scientist, Duncan Wingham, told the BBC, arguing however that the cost of replacing CryoSat was tiny when compared with the cost of ignorance.

Ice cover is one of the key measurements of the effect of climate change.

Getting an accurate idea of the seasonal extent and thickness of polar ice, especially the floating sea ice at the North Pole, would give a vital clue as the state of global warming.

At present, such figures are derived visually from satellite flybys, data from survey vessels and scientific expeditions. CryoSat's big plus was accuracy to within a centimetre (0.4 of an inch) annually, in a three-year mission.

CryoSat was the first in ESA's Earth Explorer Programme, of small satellites to look at key aspects of our planet's physics and environment.

The next launch, due in 2006, is devoted to Earth's gravity. This is followed by a satellite to observe soil moisture and ocean salinity, due in 2007, followed by another satellite to monitor atmospheric dynamics, also in

Later in the calendar is Swarm, a 2009 mission to explore Earth's geomagnetic field, and EarthCARE, to help forecasters understand the role of aerosol droplets in the climate, which is due for launch in 2012.

Rebuilding CryoSat would probably cost less than the original price tag, because the design for it already exists and so the only new costs are manufacture and testing, said Liebig.

But he refused to be committed as to whether any CryoSat 2 would still use Russia's Rockot launcher, a service provided in a joint venture between EADS Space Transportation of Germany and Krunichev of Russia.

The Russian authorities have set up a board of inquiry into Saturday's failure. It is expected to report back in a few weeks.

An important indication of whether funding will be allocated for a replacement will come at a meeting of ESA science and research ministers in Paris in December.

ESA's budget has been badly strained in recent years by the need to improve a design flaw of the 10-tonne version of its Ariane-5 rocket. December's agenda already faces a long list of demands, led by a scheme to send another lander to Mars.

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