Together with the site at Koeln, the DLR site at Oberpfaffenhofen is one of Germany's largest research centres. Located near the A96 motorway between Munich and Lindau, the site is home to eight scientific institues and currently employs approximately 1700 people. The research centre's main fields of activity include paricipating in space missions, climate research, research and development in the field of Earth observation, developing navigation systems and advanced robotics development.
A thin layer of silvery-white ice clouds exists on the edge of our atmosphere. Known as noctilucent clouds or polar mesospheric clouds (PMCs), they form at 83 kilometres above the poles of our Earth during summer. A recent NASA long-duration balloon mission carrying an instrument developed by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) on board was able to observe these clouds over the course of almost six days at their place of origin in the mesosphere.
Scientists from the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; FDLR) Microwaves and Radar Institute are developing special radar technologies and analytical methods that enable the highly accurate observation of permafrost. As part of DLR's Permafrost Airborne SAR Experiment (PermASAR), they are carrying out extensive measurement flights over the permafrost region of Canada.
Xiaoxiang Zhu of the Remote Sensing Technology Institute at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) has been awarded the 30,000 euro Leopoldina Early Career Award 2018. The German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina honours her for her outstanding achievements in satellite-based Earth observation, focused on mapping worldwide urbanisation and assessing natural hazards.
Its view of Earth will be something special: The DESIS hyperspectral instrument has 235 spectral channels to look at our planet and observe the changes in land and water surfaces. On 27 August 2018 at about 21:00 CEST, the instrument developed by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) and equipped with a robotic arm was taken out of the airlock of the International Space Station (ISS) and installed on the MUSES platform located on the space station's exterior.
Not too hot and not too cold. Not too many boulders, nor too few. Easily accessible and scientifically exciting. Meeting the requirements that the Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT) team had for the landing site on the asteroid Ryugu was no easy task. "However, we have now decided on an almost perfect landing site," says Ralf Jaumann from the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) Institute of Planetary Research, who is Principal Investigator of the MASCOT landing probe and responsible for the lander's MasCam camera experiment.