Second funding period

TRR 170 approved for second funding period from 2020 to 2023

TRR 170 "Late Accretion onto Terrestrial Planets" receives another four years of support and started January 1, 2020. The funding amounts to around nine million euros. The TRR has been approved for an additional funding period by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to continue the study of how terrestrial planets formed. The spokesperson is Professor Thorsten Kleine from the Institut für Planetologie from the University of Münster (WWU). The TRR 170 is run by teams at the University of Münster and Freie Universität Berlin and researchers from Technische Universität Berlin, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, and the German Aerospace Center. The researchers investigate the formation of terrestrial planets - that are Earth-like planets - and aim to ascertain the conditions necessary to create a life-sustaining planet like our own.

Planetologist Thorsten Kleine explains that the first funding period allowed them to establish strong working relationships between Münster and Berlin, and they were already able to gain groundbreaking new insights into the formation of terrestrial planets. Now the goal by the end of 2023 is to use these results to develop a comprehensive model for the formation of planets in the inner solar system.

TRR 170 is particularly interested in the period from about 4.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. Scientists think that at about 4.5 billion years ago the Moon was formed by a collision between the Earth and a body the size of Mars. Following this event, the Earth, like other planets in the inner solar system, was continuously bombarded by asteroids. The craters on the Moon's surface are direct evidence of this bombardment. To better understand how these impacts affected Earth's evolutionary history, TRR 170 uses a multidisciplinary approach combining expertise from geochemistry, cosmochemistry, geophysics, planetary remote sensing, and astrophysics.