Department of Earth Sciences
Service Navigation
Welcome to homepage of the "Planetary Geophysics" working group!
This page is currently under construction due to an extensive rebuild of our website. While we are working on it, feel free to read about our current projects below.
Projects
PLATO (PLANETARY TRANSITS AND OSCILLATIONS OF STARS)
Does a second Earth exist in the Universe? Planet hunter Plato will focus on the properties of rocky planets orbiting Sun-like stars. In particular, Plato will discover and characterise planets in orbits up to the habitable zone – the ‘goldilocks’ region around a star where the temperature is just right for liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface. Plato will characterise hundreds of rocky (including Earth twins), icy or giant planets by providing exquisite measurements of their radii (3% precision), masses (better than 10% precision) and ages (10% precision). This will revolutionise our understanding of planet formation and the evolution of planetary systems, as well as the potential habitability of these diverse worlds.
SPP 1992: EXPLORING THE DIVERSITY OF EXTRASOLAR PLANETS
The SPP 1992 addresses the diversity and complexity of exoplanets. It links observational methods for planet detection and characterization with theory and modeling. One of the most exciting recent discoveries in astronomy is the existence of a huge variety of extrasolar planets orbiting other stars, including numerous multi-planet systems. Exoplanets can be very different to those found in our Solar System, and range from the so-called “Hot Jupiter” and “mini-Neptune” gas planets to large rocky planets (“super-”Earths). This Priority Programme aims to explore such diversity and understand its origins. The SPP 1992 wants to make substantial contributions to answering the following fundamental questions: What does the diversity of exoplanets tell us about their formation processes and the evolution of planets and planetary systems? What can we learn about the astrophysical conditions necessary to harbour life and are these conditions common in our Milky Way?
VERITAS VENUS EMISSIVITY MAPPER POWER SYSTEM
The NASA mission VERITAS is planned to launch to Venus in the next decade and will carry the Venus Emissivity Mapper (VEM). The instrument will map the surface of Venus in narrow spectral windows where the Venus atmosphere is more transparent and would allow us to distinguish major rock types such as basalt and granite. The Freie Universität Berlin will supply the VEM power electronics, develop radiative transfer models that are used to derive surface emissivity from the VEM data and model its uncertainty based on instrument performance, and supports the planning of operations and the instrument calibration.