The vision of the Euclid space telescope has been restored following a delicate operation that successfully melted a thin layer of ice that had been clouding its sight, the European Space Agency announced on Tuesday.

There had been fears that the creeping ice could delay the mission of Europe's space telescope, which blasted off in July on the world's first mission to investigate the cosmic mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

However a de-icing procedure to gently warm up an optimal mirror on the telescope "performed significantly better than hoped", the ESA said.

"After the very first mirror was warmed by just 34 degrees, Euclid's sight was restored," it added.

In November, scientists on the ground noticed that they were losing a little light coming into the telescope's visible light imager.

They determined that the problem was a layer of ice—thought to be just the width of a strand of DNA—building up on the telescope's optical surfaces.

From radar instruments smaller than a shoebox to radiometers the size of a milk carton, there are more tools available to scientists today for observing complex Earth systems than ever before. But this abundance of available sensors creates its own unique challenge: how can researchers organize these diverse instruments in the most efficient way for field campaigns and science missions?

To help researchers maximize the value of science missions, Bart Forman, an Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland, and a team of researchers from the Stevens Institute of Technology and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center prototyped an Observational System Simulation Experiment (OSSE) for designing science missions dedicated to monitoring terrestrial freshwater storage.