Stephan Ulamec is an Austrian geophysicist, born in Salzburg on January 27, 1966, with more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and several participations in space missions and payloads operated by diverse space agencies. He is working at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, DLR) in Cologne. He is regularly giving lectures about his publications in aerospace engineering at the University of Applied Sciences: Fachhochschule FH-Aachen. Main aspects of his work are related to the exploration of small bodies in the Solar System (asteroids and comets).
Ulamec studied Geophysics at the Karl-Franzens University in Graz (Austria) as student of Prof. . He finished his PhD on "Acoustic and Electrical Methods for the Exploration of Atmospheres and Surfaces, with Application to Saturn's Moon Titan" in 1991.
FromÃÂ 1991 till 1993 he worked as a research fellow at the European Space Agency (ESA), specifically at European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, in The Netherlands. Since 1994, he is at the Microgravity User Support Center (MUSC) which is part of the DLR Space Operations and Astronaut Training (SOAT). He has made several presentations at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC).
Stephan Ulamec has been the project manager of the Rosetta lander Philae, which successfully landed on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014.
He has also been Payload Manager of MASCOT, a lander made in common by the French space agency (CNES) and the DLR, that has been delivered by the JAXA Hayabusa2 spacecraft to asteroid (162173) Ryugu in 2018.
He is one of two lead scientists (Co Principal Investigator) of the French-German MMX rover called Idefix, together with Dr Patrick Michel. This rover is to be launched in 2026 by the Japanese Mars Moons eXploration (MMX), a JAXA (Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency) mission to the Mars natural satellite Phobos.
Ulamec is also part of the Science Management Board for the ESA Hera mission, launched in 2024 with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, aimed at operating a rendezvous and characterising in details the asteroid (65803) Didymos and its natural satellite Dimorphos, and also analysing the artificial impact created by the American space agency NASA probe DART in September 2022.
He is involved in NEO-MAPP, a European Union Horizon 2020 project to study mitigation and characterisation techniques for potentially hazardous asteroids.
From January 2020 till December 2023, he is chairing the ESA Solar System and Exploration Working Group (SSEWG) and is a member of the Space Science Advisory Committee (SSAC).