With today's contribution I want to fulfil the promise I made in the blog entry I wrote on 12 July 2011 to inform you about the results of the tests on the usability of the German Aerospace Center's (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und- Raumfahrt; DLR) new web portal.

On 18 September 2011, German Aerospace Day, DLR and ESA staged the first European SpaceTweetup. A tweetup is an event in which users of the social media platform Twitter meet up. Together with ESA, we invited our Twitter followers to come and find out more about the European aerospace industry, meet scientists and astronauts and have a look at our research facilities and aircraft.

The new version of DLR's iOS App provides a wealth of information right at your fingertips - now also supporting the features of the iPad.

Today we sent off the last invitation letters for the first european SpaceTweetup, jointly organised by DLR and ESA. I cannot make clear enough how happy I am to organise and host this event together with our friends from ESA's communication department. But before I give you a little bit of background information on how the event came about, let me first answer the often heard question:

Finished at last! The redesigned web portal for the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) is ready to receive the first of its close to 500,000 visitors per month. We have been working on the redesign for some time now, and are more than pleased with the result.

Astronomers on board SOFIA fly over most of the water vapour in the atmosphere; it is precisely this that makes the desired infrared observations possible. But the fact that SOFIA flies has another major advantage: it is a mobile observatory. In contrast to ground-based observatories, it can be used at different locations around the globe. This can be very useful, for example, for the Pluto occultation that will take place these days.

Ever since the discovery of the telescope, man has been fascinated by the observation of the surface of the Moon. The constantly changing light coming from the Sun causes craters, mountains, valleys and plains to take on continuously varying appearances. Yet, as we look at this atmosphereless natural satellite, we get the impression that the Moon has not changed, even over the span of a human lifetime. But is this really the case?

On 26 December 2004, a devastating tsunami destroyed large parts of the coastline of the Indian Ocean. It is estimated that 250,000 people lost their lives because there was no early warning system. Shortly afterwards, the German government decided to spend 50 million Euros to develop a tsunami early warning system in Indonesia, the most severely affected country. Scientists from major German research centres presented innovative concepts for such a system to the political decision makers. Convinced of the feasibility of the proposal, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung; BMBF) decided to support the project, now named the German-Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (GITEWS), as a joint development led by the German Research Centre for Geosciences (Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum; GFZ) in Potsdam.

On 19 March 2011 everything came together perfectly – in a completely clear sky there was a full Moon and, what is more, at almost the exact time, the Moon passed through the point of closest approach to Earth on its elliptical orbit. This meant we were able to admire an unusually large and bright full Moon. Not wanting to let this opportunity pass, I photographed the Moon through my telescope.

On Tuesday, 1 March 2011, Dirk Ewers, one of our readers, caught the International Space Station (ISS) on camera, as it was passing overhead in the evening sky near Kassel in central Germany. Ewers has sent in the fantastic images that show ATV-2 Johannes Kepler and Space Shuttle Discovery docked with the ISS. Using almost 2000 of these individual images, he has put together a video sequence of the docked spacecraft passing almost directly overhead.

The first version of the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) iPhone App is now available via the iTunes store. This free App gives users access to a wealth of information wherever they go. The DLR App is a dynamic online news aggregator that compiles all relevant information on DLR research areas of space, aviation, energy and transport - from breaking news to videos to imagery - and delivers it to your iOS device (iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad).

During 'The Future of Energy' Year of Science, DLR prepared one question each week on the topic of energy, answered by the science journalist, Jan Oliver Löfken. Users were invited to post their questions and comments on the blog, and we responded as they came in – we received a total of 150 contributions. Read 51 posts on our Energy Blog and see how researchers want to safeguard our energy supply in the future and what policies are being put in place for this in the world of politics.

Earlier this week I received a slightly puzzling email from my colleague Alan Brown over at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center. He reported that earlier this month, on the night before SOFIA was due to start her first scientific flight, a strange cargo aircraft with a very odd propulsion system was spotted flying overhead. At that time, SOFIA's telescope system was still being tested for the flight next morning. Tom Tschida took a couple of quick shots, but when he looked back a moment later, it was gone!

As the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted, in Iceland at the end of March/ early April 2010, its ash cloud created an unprecedented situation for European air travel. By mid-April, air travel over northern and central Europe was resumed. DLR was involved in investigating the ash cloud and its effects on air travel in several different ways. I'd like to use this blog entry to illustrate our experiences and learning processes in online communication over this period in mid April 2010, especially on DLR blogs and on Twitter.

We have all seen the images of the first manned Moon landing in 1969 often enough on the TV and remember the pictures of the lunar surface taken from orbit or from the landing site itself. But how much of all this can be seen with a telescope? And just where is the landing site? Here is a travel guide with a very special destination.

Ever more frequently, we in the DLR Communication Department have to answer the question how and why we use social networks and social media in our work. In this blogpost I'd like to go into our social media strategy - and to explain our approach to online communications in general.

DLR staff member Thilo Kranz took this great image in his leisure time last Sunday. It shows a transit of the Sun by the International Space Station ISS with Space Shuttle Atlantis docked.

The DLR Web Portal is indeed the most important tool in our online communication arsenal. Nevertheless, here at DLR Communication, over the last few years we have realised that we are not able to reach all potential communication partners on this platform. Therefore, we decided to go where those people were, for example, to the social media portals. We are also fully aware of the fact that communication is not a one-way street. We want to be contactable, to open a channel for feedback and to respond to what we are told. Twitter is an ideal medium for that purpose.

The SOFIA ‘flying observatory’, a collaboration between NASA and DLR, is making great progress. After two test flights in December 2009, a third successful flight was made on 15 January 2010. A brief news roundup.

Today, we have taken our new DLR Blogs platform live; we wish to offer you a warm welcome. We are starting with three blogs. Firstly, there is a blog by Jan Wörner, chairman of the DLR Executive board, who offers insights into his work. Secondly, we have started our NewsBlog, in which we intend to publish the short stories, pictures, videos or other items of interest that do not find a place on the homepage of our web portal – www.dlr.de/en. Last but not least, there's the EnergyBlog. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung; BMBF) has nominated 'The Future of Energy' as the topic for the german Science Year 2010. This is more than sufficient reason for us to address the subject with a dedicated blog, in which we will also answer an 'Energy Question of the Week'.