Our research group has a network of partners

The astronomy research group cooperates with national and international partners. Our research group is an integral part of the data analysis consortium of the Gaia project.

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Our Partners

ESA

The European space agency ESA operates the Gaia satellite and the infrastructure for the data analysis of the mission. We monitor the atomic clocks on board for ESA and provide scientific support for a variety of technical questions relating to the mission. In addition, the ESA directly supports our work on the subject of astrometric detection of gravitational waves.

DLR

As the national space agency, DLR is the main sponsor of the DPAC consortium. A large part of our research is funded by DLR.

DPAC

The Data Processing & Analysis Consortium (DPAC) processes, analyzes and publishes the data from the Gaia Mission. The consortium is an association of over 20 European institutions and research groups. Our working group is an integral part of DPAC and is responsible for the core astrometric data processing, the heart of the mission data.

ZIH

The Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing at TU Dresden provides us with several million CPU hours of computing power per year for our research. Only with the help of supercomputers like those at the ZIH can we process the huge amounts of data that Gaia delivers to us.

IAU

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has been founded in 1922. The IAU is a worldwide association and unites more than 10.000 professional astronomers from around the world. The IAU coordinates astronomical research at international level and acts as the recognized international authority for assigning designations and names to celestial bodies or defining standards, for instance definitions of celestial reference systems used in the astronomical research. Member of IAU in the Lohrmann-Observatory are: Prof. Sergei A. Klioner; Univ. Prof (i. R.) Michael H. Soffel; Dr. Sven Zschocke

DFG

The German Research Foundation DFG supports a lot of research work of our astronomy group. In particular, a large part of the current work in the field of high-precision astrometry is supported by the DFG.

Cooperations of the Astronomy Research Group

World-class astronomical research is often done in close collaboration with other groups of scientists. Hence, also the Lohrmann Observatory takes profit of many national and international cooperations.

Especially for the Gaia mission, our team is widely connected:

Our group is member of the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC). This is a team of expert scientists and software developers from over 20 countries, responsible for the processing of Gaia's data with the final objective of producing the Gaia Catalogue. DPAC has the task to develop the data processing algorithms, the corresponding software, and the IT infrastructure for Gaia. It also executes the algorithms during the mission in order to turn the raw telemetry from Gaia into the final scientific data products that will be released to the scientific community.
Within DPAC, we are members of Coordination Unit 3 (CU3). This team is responsible for the core-processing of the data and the computation of the so called astrometric solution for the more than 1.8 billion sources, that are seen by Gaia.
Furthermore, the head of our group, Prof. S.A.Klioner, is also member of the Gaia science team. These 9 european scientists provide ESA with advice and guidance on the design, implementation, data analysis, and all other aspects related to the scientific performance and goals of Gaia.