Ten min-utes later, everything was back on track. “That was the standard joke played by the launch team, to increase the tension,” recalls Trümper. Five minutes before the scheduled take-off, a civilian plane suddenly appeared above the campus the countdown had to be interrupted. The live transmission from Cape Canaveral was broadcast on a large screen. In the evening, more than 500 guests have gathered at the German Space Operations Center in Oberpfaffen-hofen. The experts were now expected to “fly” the two-and- a-half ton ROSAT, worth several hundred million Deutsch-marks at the time, monitor its functionality, and constantly send commands and receive data via the DLR antenna in Lichtenau, near Weilheim, Germany.įriday, June 1, 1990. The control center at the German Aerospace Center (known by its German acronym DLR, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt) is the Bavarian equivalent of America’s Houston, and was involved in manned projects such as the two space shuttle missions D1 and D2 in the 1980s and 1990s. While Trümper was with some of his team members in the US, those who had remained at home witnessed the launch at the Oberpfaffenhofen-based research center. “I took a final look at ROSAT through a window there,” says the astronomer.
A few days before lift-off, he once again traveled in the elevator to the top of the Delta II launch system. Joachim Trümper remembers the launch date on Jlike it was yesterday, and was, of course, present at Cape Canaveral Space Center in the US. The 78-year-old has dedicated more than half of his research life to the X-ray satellite. “It was our baby,” says the professor emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. When you talk to Trümper about ROSAT, you can certainly detect a hint of wistfulness. Joachim Trümper smiles broadly when confronted with this: “The likelihood of a single person being injured was roughly one in ten billion.” In an article entitled “Directly in its Path” published on January 30, 2012, it reported that ROSAT fell to Earth “just barely missing the Chinese capital Beijing.” The satellite “would likely have torn deep craters into the city.” The magazine believes that the catastrophe could even have damaged German-Chinese relations. Didn’t the most famous German research satellite deserve a more fitting finale? At least the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel took pity and tried to save what could be saved. The pile of debris came from the southwest, flew over the Gulf of Bengal and finally crashed into the sea at 450 km/h.
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