Gunter Schreier, deputy director of DLR’s German Remote Sensing Data Center, was honoured by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) with its “Distinguished Service Award 2020” in recognition of his outstanding services to the Federation as Chairmen of the Earth Observation Committee. Gunter Schreier has been a member of this committee since 2010 and its chairman from 2015 to 2018.
Founded in 1951 in Paris, the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) is the oldest and largest union of national organisations and companies active in the aerospace sector. Its German founding members were the Society for Space Research Stuttgart and the Society for Space Research Hamburg. In the meantime the IAF has 397 institutional members from 68 countries. The IAF permanent secretariat is in Paris. In 2019 Prof. Pascale Ehrenfreund, chair of the DLR executive board, became president of the IAF.
An annual IAF milestone is the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) with several thousand participants, among them DLR, always with its own stand and numerous contributions to the congress program. In 2018 the IAC congress took place in Bremen and in 2019 – the 60th anniversary of the first landing of humans on the moon –in Washington, D.C. This year's congress was scheduled for October in Dubai, but because of the corona pandemic it has been postponed until 2021 and replaced this year by a virtual version.