Space Flight Technology Department
The Space Flight Technology department supports the satellite and sounding rocket missions operated here and it works on pioneering technologies for the space flight of the future. It develops innovative solutions for safe and efficient flight dynamics operations and provides them for current missions. It conducts research in the field of GNSS-based navigation, on-orbit servicing (OOS), space situational awareness (SSA), on-board autonomous data analysis and real-time communication.
Sustainable space flight is currently one of the greatest challenges in the space sector. In particular, this includes avoidance, observation, orbit determination and removal of space debris. Autonomy and automation are of great importance, for example in the area of autonomous formation flight and orbit control of constellations, as well as in the area of high-precision on-board orbit determination. We contribute to new navigation technologies such as orbit and clock determination using satellites in Low Earth Orbits as well as new data processing technologies on board satellites. We demonstrate this in the context of experiments on small satellites or other platforms.
We are significantly involved in the operation of satellites (communication satellites, navigation satellites, Earth observation satellites, research satellites) by providing the flight dynamics ground segment for all GSOC satellite missions and by flight dynamics operation of the satellites of the European satellite navigation system Galileo at the Galileo Control Center (GCC).
The Space Flight Technology department consists of three mainly research and development-oriented groups and the group Flight Dynamics Services.