German Aerospace Center, DLR

Name: German Aerospace Center, DLR
Address: Linder Höhe, Cologne, 51147, DE
Telephone: +4922036010
Price range: Not applicable

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German Aerospace Center, DLR

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) is Germany's national research centre for aeronautics and space.

03/09/2026

The countdown is on! 🛰️

The MMX space probe is now complete, with the Idefix rover mounted and ready for launch towards the Mars system.

JAXA recently unveiled the finished spacecraft to the public at the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, ahead of final preparations for mounting it onto the launch rocket.

Idefix, built together by DLR and CNES, is clearly visible here in its travel position between the probe's landing legs. 🤏 Roughly the size of a crate of drinks, it weighs just 25 kilograms.

Around the turn of 2028/2029, the MMX mothership will release the rover into free fall towards Phobos, from a height of approximately 40 metres above the surface.

Once it lands, Idefix will make history as the first wheeled rover to drive on a celestial body with such extremely low gravity – less than a thousandth of Earth’s.

The MMX mission is scheduled to launch on 19 October 2026 at 21:41 CEST. 🚀

13/08/2026

🧑‍🚀 AstroRad vest significantly reduces radiation exposure for astronauts

New findings from the DLR-led MARE experiment show that wearable protection could reduce an astronaut's radiation dose by up to nearly 60% during a strong solar storm. ☀️ The results were just published in the journal Science Advances.

In 2022, the two phantoms Helga and Zohar flew to the Moon and back aboard NASA's Artemis I mission. 👥🌔 Zohar wore StemRad's AstroRad radiation protection vest, while Helga flew unprotected. Comparing their data let researchers assess, for the first time, how effective this kind of vest really is.

☢️ MARE was the first study to focus specifically on radiation exposure in the female body beyond low Earth orbit – an important step given that women face a statistically higher risk of radiation-induced cancer.

These results will also help make long-duration crewed missions to the Moon and Mars safer – and lay the foundations for NASA's lunar programme. 🚀

03/08/2026

Modular mobility is on the move 🚐⚡

Meet U-Shift: a modular vehicle concept developed at DLR, where a U-shaped, automated electric Driveboard pairs with interchangeable capsules for either passengers or cargo.

At the heart of the project is automated docking, bringing the Driveboard and capsule together with centimetre-level precision. No easy feat, which requires sensors, smart software and precise steering to work together so the vehicle can park and connect itself. As part of the U-Shift II project, researchers developed a new automated Driveboard prototype and successfully demonstrated automated capsule swapping.

The project was led by DLR, together with FKFS Stuttgart, and .uniulm.

And this is just the beginning. Starting in mid-2027, a test fleet will be trialled in Braunschweig, Germany as part of the follow-up project IMoGer – complementing existing public transport and handling courier, express and parcel deliveries.

From research to real-world mobility, the future is getting closer. 👀

31/07/2026

⛑🔥Watching wildfires from orbit – and helping crews on the ground respond faster.

DLR's Fire Monitoring System uses MODIS data from NASA's Terra-1 and Aqua-1 satellites, plus Sentinel-3 OLCI, to detect burning areas and track how they spread, almost as it happens.
DLR's Center for Satellite Based Crisis Information (ZKI) turns this into maps updated several times a day, showing burnt area extent, fire severity and how a fire develops over time – all viewable for any region.🗺️📍

That kind of data, delivered fast, can make a real difference for the teams assessing and responding to wildfires. 👩‍🚒

Read more about it here:
https://www.dlr.de/en/research-and-transfer/featured-topics/fighting-forest-fires-with-high-technology

28/07/2026

🌔 What's hiding beneath the lunar surface?

🌋 Lava tubes could one day protect astronauts from radiation, micrometeorites and extreme temperature swings on the Moon. Water ice, if it's there, could provide drinking water, oxygen and even rocket fuel. But to use either, we first need reliable ways to detect it.

To do that, researchers are using seismic methods to find natural vibrations in the ground as part of the NEPOS (Near-Surface Seismic Exploration of Planetary Bodies with Adaptive Networks) project.

Together with Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, DLR researchers have tested these methods inside lava tubes on Lanzarote 🇪🇸, chosen for their resemblance to lunar underground conditions. This built on earlier trials in the LUNA Hall in Cologne.

22/07/2026

PLATO is ready to go 🚀

The PLATO space telescope has completed its electromagnetic compatibility tests at ESA's Maxwell test facility in Noordwijk 🇳🇱, checking that its many electronic systems can all run together without interfering with one another. The spacecraft has now passed all the necessary tests ahead of its launch in March 2027. ✅

DLR leads the international PLATO consortium and developed the readout electronics and data-processing systems for its fast cameras. We also play a key role in the scientific evaluation of mission data.

🛰️ PLATO will fly to the L2 Lagrange point, 1.5 million km from Earth, where its 26 cameras will scan hundreds of thousands of stars in search of Earth-sized planets orbiting Sun-like stars.

09/07/2026

Half a century of wind, wings and data! 💨✈️

Back on 30 June 1976, the then German Research and Test Institute for Aviation and Space Flight (Deutsche Forschungs- und Versuchsanstalt für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DFVLR), today's DLR, teamed up with the Netherlands Aerospace Centre to launch DNW, the German-Dutch Wind Tunnels foundation.

The mission: build Europe's biggest wind tunnel and put it to work.

After 50 great years, 6 facilities and countless gusts of wind later, DNW has contributed to the development of numerous icons of the aviation industry and research. These include the Airbus A380, the Eurofighter and the F-35, all of which were rigorously tested and perfected in the DNW tunnels before they even left the ground.

Here's to the next 50 years of mind-BLOWING research! 🎉

09/07/2026

A Japanese space probe just whizzed close by a 450-metre asteroid at 18,000 km/h. 🚀

🛰️On 5 July, Hayabusa2♯ made a high-speed flyby of asteroid Torifune, a rock nearly half a kilometre in diameter, whose orbit crosses Earth's. The manoeuvre wasn't just a feat of navigation – it's practice for something much bigger: developing the technology to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.

💫Yep, planetary defence is real, and an asteroid impact is something we can prevent. The name says it all: Hayabusa2♯ (pronounced ‘SHARP’) stands for Small Hazardous Asteroid Reconnaissance Probe.

👩‍💻DLR is part of the Hayabusa2♯ science team – helping to analyse data from the flyby that is crucial for future asteroid deflection via ‘kinetic impact’.

Next stop for Hayabusa2♯: asteroid 1998 KY26 in 2031 – at just 11 metres across, it is spinning so fast one 'day' lasts only 5.4 minutes.

📸 Swipe for images →

Image description and credit:
Image 1
Close-up of Torifune taken by Hayabusa2♯ on 5 July 2026. Torifune is an abbreviation of Ame-no-torifune – a god, and also his ship, that could “travel safely at high speed like a bird and steady as a rock.”

Credit: ©JAXA, The University of Tokyo, Chiba Institute of Technology, Tokyo University of Science, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Paris Observatory, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

Image 2
Torifune (in the yellow rectangle) spotted from 7 million kilometres away on 20–21 June 2026, moving in the direction of the arrow.

Credit: ©JAXA, Chiba Institute of Technology, Japan Spaceguard Association

Slide 3
An illustration of Hayabusa2, carrying the German-French MASCOT lander, on its previous 3200-million-kilometre journey to asteroid Ryugu.
Credit: © DLR

06/07/2026

🔴Did you know there's a valley on Mars named after a language that hasn't been spoken in nearly 2000 years?

Mamers Valles is one of a minority of non-Latin names anywhere on Mars – and we owe it to the Osci – a group of people in southern Italy who spoke ‘Oscan’ from the 5th century BC to at least the 1st century AD. 🌍

The Osci were regarded as crude barbarians by the Greeks and Romans. In fact, the word ‘obscene’ may even trace back to them.

🏜️ The valley itself is a serious piece of Martian geography: it stretches approximately 1000 kilometres and is up to 25 kilometres wide – more than twice the length of Earth's Grand Canyon.

It was formed 3.8 billion years ago by water, then ice.
A once volatile planet, with one small corner still carrying the name of a people and a language swallowed up by Rome. 🪐

02/07/2026

🤖What happens when AI enters the cockpit and the control tower?

✈️Every day, thousands of flights depend on split-second decisions made by pilots and air traffic controllers. 🧠As aviation grows more complex, so does the mental demand on the people behind it – and that's exactly the challenge DLR researchers tackled with the LOKI project.

Over four years, the team developed AI demonstrators for both air traffic control and the cockpit, built around one key question: how do we create AI systems that pilots and controllers actually trust? Every step was shaped by the expectations and requirements of real aviation professionals.

📄The results speak for themselves: simulations showed that human and digital controllers working together managed up to 25% more traffic than the current maximum for an airspace sector.

The skies are getting busier. LOKI is helping make sure the systems managing them are ready — flexible, reliable and efficient, without compromising safety or human control.

Adresse

Linder Höhe
Cologne
51147

Telefon

+4922036010

Webseite

https://www.dlr.de/en/latest/news

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