ESA’s Hera mission for planetary defense performed a flyby of Mars, as part of its gravitational assistance manoeuvre to shorten its journey to the binary asteroid system Didymos. During the flyby, the spacecraft came around 5000 km from the surface of Mars, having also the opportunity to obtain images of its two moons, Deimos (during the approach) and Phobos (when departing Mars). Julia de León, Javier Licandro, and George Prodan, researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, participate in this mission, successfully launched from Cape Cañaveral, Florida (USA) on October 7, 2024

The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has received a visit from Robert P. Kirshner, Executive Director of the Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory (TIO) . During his stay at the IAC headquarters in La Laguna, he was welcomed by the center’s director, Valentín Martínez Pillet, and by the deputy director, Eva Villaver Sobrino, along with other members of the research institute. During his visit, he was able to learn firsthand about the institution’s scientific and technological capabilities and gave a colloquium titled The Thirty Meter Telescope and Science of the Future

From today until 5 December 2025, the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is hosting the SO/PHI Science and Team Meetings, an international gathering focused on the scientific and technical advances of the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) instrument aboard ESA's Solar Orbiter (SO) space mission. The development of PHI was co-led by the Spanish Space Solar Physics Consortium (S3PC), which also currently coordinates its scientific operation and exploitation. The IAC is part of this network. PHI is a high-precision solar observation instrument equipped with two telescopes—one