Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research
The research focus of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research is our cosmic neighborhood: the solar system with its planets and moons, comets and asteroids as well as the sun. The aim of the scientists is to describe the processes in the solar system in models and to simulate them on the computer. In addition, instruments are being developed and built to study these bodies from space. The Institute is involved in numerous space missions. More info.
Solar activity reconstructed over a millennium
An international research team including scientists from MPS has reconstructed solar activity up to the year 969 without gaps and with a high temporal resolution of only one year from measurements of radioactive carbon in tree rings. The data, which the team led by ETH Zurich recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience, among other things impressively confirm the Sun’s known, eleven-year activity cycle.
500 days until the launch of Sunrise III
Preparation have begun: in the summer of 2022, the balloon-borne solar observatory Sunrise will embark on its third stratospheric flight. Equipped with a 1-meter telescope, three new scientific instruments and a sophisticated image stabilization system, the mission, led by MPS, will thus enable unprecedented observations of the solar surface and the adjacent, overlying layers of the solar atmosphere.
The MPS in times of corona: Current status
The Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research takes the current risk situation due to the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 very seriously. It is the Institute's primary objective to minimize the risk of infection for its staff and to contribute in general to minimizing the spread of the virus.
Read more about current measures and restrictions here.
NASA Award for MPS Engineer
NASA has honored the group of experts who selected the site for the scientific instruments carried by the InSight Mars probe in the days following its landing with the NASA Group Achievement Award. Among the honorees is Dr.-Ing. Marco Bierwirth of MPS. As a member of the Insight Instrument Site Selection Group, Bierwirth examined where SEIS would find optimal working conditions in the immediate vicinity of the landing probe.