About the author

Christian Krause

Christian Krause works at DLR's Microgravity User Support Center (MUSC) in Cologne. There, he is the lead operations manager for the HP3 experiment package on NASA's InSight mission. He was previously Ground Segment and Operations Manager for the Franco-German asteroid lander MASCOT, which touched down on the asteroid Ryugu in 2018 as part of the Japanese Hayabusa2 mission and sent numerous images and data to Earth. In the future, he will focus on preparing operations for a small rover that will land on the Martian moon Phobos in the late 2020s as part of the Japanese MMX (Mars Moon eXploration) mission.

Posts from Christian Krause

Space | 17. May 2022

Martian dust reduces power for InSight – but measurements are ongoing

NASA's InSight lander has been operating on Mars for a good year and a half during its extended mission. However, the lander has been struggling for a considerable time with a reduction in available power, which is due to the increasing quantities of Martian dust covering its solar panels. This dust can only be removed by sufficiently strong Martian winds. However, despite detecting many passing whirlwinds, none have cleaned off the solar panels. read more