Nobel Prize winner shaped groundbreaking Earth-observing mission
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics laureate Klaus Hasselmann helped to shape a groundbreaking Earth-observation mission that paved the way for the modern study of our planet’s environment. The German oceanographer and climate modeller was awarded the coveted prize for his contribution to the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, which has enabled scientists to quantify the climate’s natural variability and better predict climate change. Hasselmann won half of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics, with the other half shared by scientists Syukuro Manabe and Giorgio Parisi for their own research on disorder and fluctuations in physical systems.
Hasselmann, now 89 and still active at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany, was also a member of an expert group that helped the European Space Agency (ESA) create its Earthobservation program and build its first mission dedicated to studying Earth from above in the 1970s. As a member of the space agency’s HighLevel Earth Observation Advisory Committee, Hasselmann contributed to the development of the European Remote Sensing satellite (ERS-1) and its successor ERS-2.