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.
Approximately 30 percent of all flights from Germany are now operated by low-cost airlines. After the insolvency of Air Berlin and the redistribution of its routes, a new record has been set for the number of low-cost flights from Germany over the winter period. Eurowings, easyJet and Ryanair dominated this growth. Eurowings and Norwegian are increasingly serving low-cost destinations outside Europe.
Researchers at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) have taken a major step forward in the development of receiver technology for solar tower power plants. The innovative radiation receiver CentRec in the solar tower at the DLR facility in Jülich passed its first test at extremely high temperatures in May 2018. During the test, the researchers heated ceramic particles in the receiver to over 965 degrees Celsius, and in doing so demonstrated that concentrated solar radiation can be used to generate and store energy at very high temperatures.
The production of hydrogen using renewable resources plays a key role in the sustainable transformation of the energy and mobility systems. This is because it is a multi-use energy carrier that can be used directly for clean mobility in fuel-cell vehicles, as a store for variable renewable energy sources, or as a starting point for the production of synthetic fuels.
Over the course of a few months, the HP3 'Mole' developed by the German Aerospace Centre (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, DLR) will burrow up to five metres deep into the Red Planet to explore its inner structure. This will be the first time that a fully automatic self-hammering probe of this sort has been used.