DLR has its headquarters in Cologne. The site is located next to Cologne-Bonn airport. Approximately 1,500 employees work in the institutes and facilities and in the central administration.
In early October 2018, the Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT) lander is expected to be in operation for approximately 16 hours on the Ryugu asteroid. The selection of the landing site will take place this August. The ideal site must firstly offer the MASCOT team engineers excellent conditions for a safe landing and stable operation on the asteroid, while providing the researchers with a wealth of new and productive measurements.
Scientists and engineers have been waiting nearly four years for the Japanese Hayabusa2 spacecraft – which is carrying the Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT) lander that was developed and constructed by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) – to reach its destination: the asteroid Ryugu.
Dealing with fluctuations in solar energy is one of the biggest challenges on the way to a sustainable energy supply. Researchers at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) are working on a technology that will hopefully make it possible to operate energy networks with a high proportion of solar energy in a more stable and efficient manner.
There are currently no uniformly applicable standards or regulations for approval and market introduction of novel heat transfer fluid for operation in solar thermal parabolic trough power plants. In principle, the medium must be independently qualified in terms of its chemical and thermodynamic properties.
As the Japanese Hayabusa2 spacecraft closes in on asteroid Ryugu, more details become visible to the planetary scientists. On 20 July 2018, from a distance of just six kilometres, the spacecraft’s Optical Navigation Camera - Telescopic (ONC-T) acquired an image of the asteroid’s surface, with its largest crater. "We see that the entire surface of Ryugu is strewn with large boulders – we have not yet seen this on an asteroid," says Ralf Jaumann, a planetary scientist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Principal Investigator for the MASCOT (Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout) lander aboard the Japanese spacecraft. It is anticipated that on 3 October 2018, MASCOT will land on Ryugu and examine the asteroid surface using four instruments.