OREANDA-NEWS. On 22 July 2009 was announced, that DHL Global Forwarding, global market leader in the air and sea freight sector, has just shipped the Mossbauer-Spectrometer MIMOS-2 to the Space Research Institute (IKI) in Russia. The spectrometer is scheduled to be launched in October from the Baikonur space center on board a Zenit rocket on a mission to Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars, and from there will deliver analyses of the chemical and mineral composition of the soil of this Martian satellite. It has been commissioned by the University of Mainz and space technology company von Hoerner & Sulger GmbH.

DHL Global Forwarding was entrusted with the task of transporting the high-grade and high-precision instrument in order to ensure it arrived in Russia on time and, more importantly, intact. Deutsche Post DHL's specialist air and ocean freight division has been working for a number of years with leading companies in the aerospace industry. It can further boast expertise in transport and security matters as well as extensive knowledge of the complex customs procedures and foreign trade conditions for importing aerospace products to Russia. DHL was therefore able to obtain all the necessary documentation in advance and even obtained authorization from the responsible authorities for a special manual check to be carried out at Frankfurt airport when exporting the spectrometer, in order to avert any risk of x-ray machines impairing MIMOS-2 functionality.

The Phobos moon orbits Mars at a distance of 6,000 km. The German Mossbauer-Spectrometer MIMOS-2 is designed to deliver analyses of the chemical and mineral composition of soil samples taken from the Martian satellite. It was developed at the University of Mainz by a team headed by Dr. Gostar Klingelhofer. The Institute of Anorganic and Analytical Chemistry itself developed the sensor head. The associated readout electronics were built by the space technology company von Hoerner & Sulger GmbH and installed in the Phobos-Grunt probe.