After attending high school in Hamburg from 1953 to 1960, Dr. Horst Uwe Keller studied physics in Hamburg and Münich. He received his diploma in physics from the University of Münich and worked as a Ph.D. student at Münich’s Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics. After completing his Ph.D. with Ludwig Biermann in 1971, he worked as a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics and from 1972 to 1975 worked in the US at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics of the University of Colorado in Boulder. In 1976 he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomie in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, where in 1987 he was promoted to the position of senior scientist. His main fields of research cover the fields of the physics of comets, stellar evolution and atmospheres, interplanetary matter, radiative transfer, planetary atmospheres and atmosphere-surface interaction.
Horst Uwe Keller has participated in several rocket experiments, deep space missions and observations by satellites. He was Principal Investigator for the Halley Multicolour Camera on board the ESA spaceprobe Giotto and for the Camera System on ESA’s Rosetta mission. He was also in charge of the IR spectrometer SIR on board ESA’s first mission to the moon, SMART 1. Most recently, he led the German team that provided the cameras for NASA’s Dawn mission to the asteroids Vesta and Ceres. His team also provided hardware for several Mars missions and for Cassini/Huygens to Saturn and Titan. Furthermore, within ESA he served as a member of the Comet Consultant Group, the Space Telescope Working Group and participated in a number of other committees.