“Horizons” the next Gerst mission
‘Horizons’ is the name of German ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst’s next mission. 41-year-old German geophysicist, Alexander Gerst is scheduled to embark on his second research trip to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of expedition 56/57 in late April 2018.. After the Belgian ESA astronaut, Frank de Winne, Gerst will be the second European to be commander of the ISS. Gerst will remain in orbit, at an altitude of around 380 kilometres, for six months – until the end of October 2018. The name ‘Horizons’ symbolises the curiosity and fascination of exploring and researching the unknown.
Read MoreCloud Statistics from Calipso Lidar Data for the Performance Assessment of a Methane Space Lidar
In this thesis a performance assessment for the future German-French climate monitoring initiative, Methane Remote Sensing Lidar Mission (MERLIN), proposed by DLR and CNES in 2010 was undertaken. A general space lidar performance issue is the obstruction by optically dense clouds. For this purpose cloud free statistics, the global cloud top flatness and global cloud top distributions were derived from the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) level 2, 333 m and 5 km lidar cloud-layer products between 01 January 2007 and 01 January 2008.
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