Gerhard Thiele
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Gerhard_Thiele.jpg
Gerhard Thiele (born September 2 1953) is a German astronaut.
Born in Heidenheim (Brenz), he visited the Friedrich-Schiller-Gymnasium in Ludwigsburg. After school he volunteered to the German Navy, serving as Operations/Weapons Officer aboard fast patrol boats. In 1976 he began to study physics at the University of Munich and the University of Heidelberg. He received his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1985 in Environmental Physics.
From 1986 to 1987 he was a postdoc at the Princeton University. In 1988 he was selected to the German astronaut team and began basic training at the DLR. In 1990 he was selected to the backup crew of the German spacelab mission D-2 (STS-55). During the mission, which took part in April 1993, he worked in the Payload Operations Control Center of DLR at Oberpfaffenhofen as the alternate payload specialist.
In 1996 he was selected by the German Space Agency to received Mission Specialist training at NASA. In August 1998 he joined the European Astronaut Team, into which the German national team was integrated. In 2000 he performed his first spaceflight with the STS-99 Shuttle Radar Topography Mission.
2003-04 he trained in Russia as the backup for André Kuipers in the Soyuz TMA-3 mission.
External links
- NASA biography (http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/thiele.html)
- ESA biography (http://www.esa.int/esaHS/ESA9FVZUMOC_astronauts_0.html)de:Gerhard Thiele