In 1995, the German Space Agency DARA selected the CHAllenging Minisatellite Payload (CHAMP) mission for development under a special support programme for the space industry in the new states of the unified Germany, with the Principal Investigator and his home institution GFZ Potsdam being ultimately responsible for the success of all mission phases. After three years of spacecraft manufactur- ing and testing, the satellite was injected successfully into its final, near circular, almost polar and low altitude (450 km) orbit from the cosmodrome Plesetsk in Russia on July 15, 2000. After a nine...

The book summarizes the author's experimental studies of phase relations in the chemical systems relevant to earth, carried out in a time period of over 20 years using piston-cylinder and multi-avil presses. A summary of the research at high pressures and temperatures carried out by many other experimental petrologists is also included. The data was used to develop an internally consistent thermodynamic model, which was then used to calculate phase diagrams. This produced the largest collection of the calculated phase diagrams published to date and the first to encompass temperature and...

The book summarizes the results of the experimental studies of phase relations in the chemical systems relevant to Earth, carried out by the author in a time period of over 20 years between 1979 and 2001. It is based on 1000 piston-cylinder experiments at pressures up to 4 GPa, and close to 700 experiments carried out with a multi-anvil apparatus at pressures up to 24 GPA. This is the largest published collection of calculated phase diagrams for the chemical systems relevant to Earth. This is also the first time that the phase relations at the relatively low pressures of the lithospheric...