About Manfred Gottwald

His first years at DLR he had spent at the German Space Operations Center (GSOC) working for Columbus. Then he joined the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) and, after it had been restructured, continued at the Remote Sensing Technology Institute until the end of his career. There he took care about numerous atmospheric remote sensing missions. His prime task was SCIAMACHY on ENVISAT, ESA’s large Earth observation satellite of the last decade. For SCIAMACHY he was responsible for developing and executing operations of this complex instrument for spaceborne atmospheric sounding which allowed sensing the Earth’s atmosphere with unprecedented flexibility.  

The goal of this work was to better understand the state of the atmosphere of our home planet. In addition, he represented DLR at international boards for a coordinated utilization of Earth observation satellites for polar science, another important field in times of global climate change. In this framework he also dealt with radar remote sensing. This methodology played a major role when, after the end of the ENVISAT mission in 2012, he turned to the field of terrestrial impact craters where he primarily exploited the unique TanDEM-X digital elevation model.