On Friday, 1st February, three days before the Training Week started, we arrived in Munich since we wanted to explore the city and Tom, our Teamleader, invited us to stay at his house for a few days. We visited the Flugwerft Oberschleissheim and some Nightlife-Locations before we had to journey on to Steinebach where we stayed during the Training Week.
On Monday morning the Training Week began with some introductions and general information about REXUS/BEXUS. After that we had a lot of very helpful workshops and lectures covering all the important fields like Team management, Implementation, Verification and Testing, structural Design of the experiment and of course the Outreach Plan.
In the afternoon we had our Opening Event: a visit of Kloster Andechs, where we were able to see and taste the real Bavarian culture. Which we did, indeed.
The Training Week continued on the next days with more lectures and excursions, e.g. to the Robotics/Research Section of the DLR, the GSOC and the GCC until we finally had our Preliminary Design Review on Thursday.
We presented our experiment in front of the Review Board which consisted of 10 experts from ESA, DLR and SSC. We got a lot of tips and advice concerning our Mechanical and Thermal Design, since our team is lacking a mechanical engineer.
Nevertheless, we got the PDR report a week later, saying we passed the PDR. But we have still to improve some parts of the SED until the CDR.
As closing event Alexander Schmidt, the main organizer of the whole Training Week, prepared a very special evening for the Experiment Teams:
He managed to combine our closing event and the 5th anniversary of the Columbus Module, which took place at the Airfield Oberschleissheim, so the student teams were able to see some presentations about the STS-122 mission by the astronauts Léopold Eyharts and Pedro Duque.
Afterwards we had dinner inbetween the exhibited planes at the museum and we were able to listen to some very interesting stories oft he local museum guide.
Our last day at Oberpfaffenhofen ended almost very quiet, but right before our departure rom GSOC the fire alarm set off, so we could stay a little bit longer at the GSOC and watch DLR staff working with the astronauts on the ISS.
After all we would like to thank all the organizers of the Training Week, expecially Alexander Schmidt, for the enlightening and outstanding week at the DLR Oberpfaffenhofen!
