Not all adventures are oceanographic!

Last week I had the chance to join students and alumni of the interdisciplinary bachelor project at Hamburg University of Technology for a flight above the port of Hamburg.

The students were flying for the very first time, so it got quite exciting at times, especially during turns.

But luckily they were quick learners and brought us home safely. Always nice to arrive at Hamburg Airport!

For all of you getting nervous now, let me take a step back and show you another picture:

We had the amazing opportunity to visit the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) in Braunschweig. And a couple of the students actually got the opportunity to fly the flight simulator! Even though I didn’t get to (sniff!) – it was absolutely fascinating. Even though the simulator opens up into a well-lit room, as you see in the picture above, it was so easy to forget we were staring at simulated landscapes in a simulated plane. It was really exciting! Some people even started feeling sick from all the turning. And we all kept staring out of the “windows” to see which part of the town we were flying over and whether we could spot our campus. Also the technology is pretty cool: the three projectors you see in the image above project onto concave mirrors, which makes the image be far away enough so the eye doesn’t focus on the screen, which makes the whole experience feel completely realistic.

We also got to see other parts of DLR which were pretty exciting, too, like the 3D view of Mars’s surface. Did you know that the highest mountain in our solar system is on Mars, and that it’s 22 km high? I bet you did not.

Thanks, Uta and Siska, for organizing this great field trip!