Status of the target development for the heavy element program

We report on the status of target development for the heavy-element program at GSI, namely for the SHIP experiment. We present some recent results in enhancing the durability of the targets irradiated with the more and more intense heavy-ion beams. The enhancement of the beam intensity is necessary in order to keep beam times at reasonable length despite cross sections in the picobam region. We synthesised new compound targets on $208Pb$-basis with significantly higher melting temperatures and built up a target monitoring system. To investigate the high-current targets and develop an active cooling system we built up a test bench for offline experiments.