CHEOPS – CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite – the ESA’s first small mission dedicated to searching for exoplanetary transits by performing ultrahigh precision photometry on bright stars already known to host planets.
The DLR Earth Sensing Imaging Spectrometer DESIS has 235 spectral channels. It is developed by DLR and will be operated on board of the International Space Station. The spatial resolution of the spectrometer is 30m in the visible and near-infarred spectral region (400-1000nm) with a swath width of 30km.
FireBIRD ist eine Erdbeobachtungsmission mit dem primären Ziel der Überwachung von Waldbränden. Es geht um die Erkennung von Hochtemperatur- Ereignissen und die Bereitstellung von Fernerkundungsdaten für Wissenschaft und Forschung sowohl im DLR wie auch für externe Partner. Das Space-Segment besteht aus den beiden Satelliten TET-1(Launch 2012) und BIROS (Launch 2016) die als Haupt- Nutzlast jeweils ein im DLR entwickeltes Kamerasystem für den sichtbaren und infraroten Spektralbereich tragen.
The airborne observatory SOFIA offers a unique access to the astronomically hardly explored THz spectral range with the latest technologies. With the spectrometers GREAT/upGREAT it is for the first time possible to detect the important atomic oxygen line at 4.7 THz with high spectral resolution. The enabling technology for these measurements is a THz laser system developed at DLR.
The mineralogy of particles returned to Earth from the asteroid Itokawa by the japaneses Hayabusa Mission in 2010 is a milestone in space exploration. Investigation of these samples allows obtaining the age of the asteroid surface, which is an important indicator for the evolution of the asteroid as well as of our Solar System. Raman spectroscopic investigations enable the nondestructive determination of the mineralogy of these small (typical size 0.1mm) and precious particles.
The Integrated Positioning Systems (IPS) is a system developed by DLR Berlin for pose estimation in an unknown environment for indoor- and outdoor applications. It does not require any external information such as GPS. IPS is based on a multi-sensor approach which allows the determination of the ego motion of an object in all six degrees of freedom in a robust and reliably way.
DLR developed the camera electronics including the focal plane, the controller and the power supply for the korean Kompsat-3 and 3A Earth observation satellites. The focal plane enables high-resolution imagery of the surface of the Earth with a ground sampling distance of up to 0.5 m in two panchromatic channels and 2m in four multi-spectral channels (red, green, blue, near infrared).
DLR develops, verifies and tests innovative remote sensing systems. The image data obtained with these sensors are processed automatically in order to provide highly accurate true orthophoto mosaics and surface models. These mosaics and models are the basis for applications such as real-time extraction of objects, automated 3D reconstruction for geospecific simulation worlds or semantic geoinformation for urban applications.
MERTIS is one of the scientific payloads of the ESA deep space mission BepiColombo. BepiColombo will be launched in 2018 to observe the planet Mercury from 2024 on. The instrument is developed by DLR in cooperation with University of Münster. The instrument is based on a highly integrated infrared spectrometer, featuring low mass of only about 3kg and low power consumption of less than 10W.