The president of the Italian National Astrophysics Institute visits the IAC

Filippo Zerbi, director de Ciencia del INAF; Nicolò D’Amico, presidente del INAF; Rafael Rebolo, director del IAC, y Ramón García López, investigador principal del grupo de Astropartículas del IAC. Crédito: Alejandra Rueda Moral (IAC).

This week, the president of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica of Italy (INAF), Nicolò D'Amico, and the director of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Rafael Rebolo, have started a negotiation for the possible installation of telescopes of the ASTRI array at the Observatorio del Teide (Tenerife).

ASTRI (Astrofisica con Specchi a Tecnologia Replicante Italiana) is a collaboration between INAF, the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil) and the North-Western University (South Africa) that was born in 2011 as a project of the Italian Ministry of Education and Research. Its aim is to develop a new technology with Cherenkov telescopes for the study of the most energetic phenomena of the Universe. 
In the Canary Islands Observatories there are currently several facilities dedicated to High Energy Astrophysics, which studies Cherenkov radiation. This is the case of the MAGIC telescopes or the LST-1, which will form part of the CTA North Observatory, all of them on the summits of La Palma. 

INAF already has an optical telescope, the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG), of 3.5 m, installed at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos (Garafía, La Palma). In addition, Italy collaborates in several projects in the Observatories of the Canary Islands.

INAF press release: ASTRI: a new pathfinder of the arrays of Cherenkov telescopes