Heike Rauer is a physicist and researches extrasolar planets and planetary bodies in our solar system. At the Department of Geosciences of the Freie Universität Berlin she is Professor of Planetary Geophysics. She also serves as an advisor to the executive board of the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, DLR) on ESA matters.

Her academic career began in 1991 with a PhD from the Max‑Planck Institute for Aeronomy (now the Max‑Planck Institute for Solar System Research) and the University of Göttingen; she remained there as a postdoctoral researcher until 1995. She then spent two years at the Observatoire de Paris in Meudon on a fellowship from the European Space Agency (ESA).

From 1997 to 2004 she was a postdoc at the Institute of Planetary Research at the DLR in Berlin‑Adlershof. In 2005 she became head of the department “Extrasolar Planets and their Atmospheres,” a position she held until 2017. At the same time she was Professor of Planetary Physics at the Technical University of Berlin from 2006 to 2017. In 2017 she was appointed Director of the Institute of Planetary Research at the DLR in Berlin, a post she held until the institute was integrated into the newly founded Institute for Space Research in 2025. Since 2017 Heike Rauer has also been a professor in the Department of Geosciences at the Free University of Berlin.

Since 2013 Heike Rauer has led the international instrument consortium for the ESA mission PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars). PLATO is scheduled to launch in early 2027 and aims to discover exoplanets orbiting sun‑like stars, with a particular focus on Earth‑like planets located in the habitable zone - i.e., at distances where moderate temperatures could allow liquid water.

She is also involved and has been involved in other space‑based projects, such as the ESA mission CHEOPS (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite), the CoRoT mission (COnvection, ROtation et Transits planétaires) of the French space agency CNES and Venus mission concepts from ESA and NASA.

Furthermore, from 2018 she served as coordinator of the German Research Foundation (DFG) priority programme "Exploring the Diversity of Extrasolar Planets," which supported a total of 51 projects involving 100 scientists across Germany over six years.

Since 2025, Heike Rauer has been Chair of the German Society for Planetology.

WiSe 25/26

• Exoplanets (Seminar)

SoSe 26

• Exoplanets (Lecture, Excercise, Seminar)

Heike Rauers research focuses on finding exoplanets - planets outside our own solar system. She is particularly interested in planets similar to Earth that are located in the habitable zone of their star - that is to say, at a distance where temperatures are moderate and liquid water could exist.

From 2006 to 2014, Heike Rauer was co-investigator of the French-European space telescope CoRoT. Since 2013, she has headed the international instrument consortium for the ESA mission PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars).

She has also been involved in other space-based projects, including ESA's Characterising Exoplanet Satellite (CHEOPS) mission as well as ESA and NASA satellite missions to Venus.

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