Dietmar Lilienthal has been a member of the SOFIA project for 15 years and he supervised the electrical and software integration of the SOFIA telescope into the Boeing 747SP in the United States. He also created the contractual undertakings for the establishment of the German SOFIA Institute (DSI) at the University of Stuttgart and, during the difficult phase of transferring SOFIA from Waco, Texas to the SOFIA Operations Center at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Southern California, coordinated the project at DLR.
Since the takeover of operational tasks by DSI, he devotes himself, in addition to his work as a project manager for BepiColombo, Gaia and EUCLID, to the interfaces with the German instruments GREAT and FIFI-LS and their scientific use on SOFIA.