IABG receives NASA award

 At a ceremony, Phil R. Morton, GRACE project manager from the NASA Institute for Science JPL (Pasadena, California), presented the American space authority's award to the German satellite builder Astrium and all subcontractors involved. IABG carried out various tests in order to qualify "Tom" and "Jerry", as the GRACE twins are known.

The German-American satellite duo GRACE ("Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment") which was tested in the IABG space test centre in 2001 was already successfully launched on 17 March 2002 from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome as the payload of a Russian Rokot rocket. Since then, they have been orbiting the earth and transmitting data, without interference, on the gravity of our planet. The GRACE mission is one component of NASA's "Earth System Science Pathfinder" programme which comprises various specialised scientific missions concerned with global changes to the ecosystem.

In their orbit around the earth, the Grace twins maintain a distance of 220 kilometres from one another. The two satellites keep a constant and very precise track of the distance between them. Since this distance fluctuates under the influence of earth's gravitation, this method makes it possible to measure the gravitational field of our planet. On the basis of the temporal changes to the gravitational field, geoscientists are learning more about dynamic events inside the earth, about the oceans' deep and surface currents and about the change to the ice caps at the Poles, on Greenland and in the mountains. The scientists expect this information to provide a whole new picture of the processes taking place both in and on the earth.

"With the GRACE mission, our wish was and still is to expand our knowledge of the earth's gravitational field a thousand times over. Since their launch in 2002, the two satellites have been providing extraordinary data for the international scientific community. This is thanks primarily to our collaborative efforts and to the work of this GRACE team", said Phil R. Morton at the award ceremony.