Researchers Julia de León and Javier Licandro of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) are participating in the Hera mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) , successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida (USA) on 7th October at 14:52 UTC. This is the first European mission for planetary defence which together with NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid redirection Test) will study the effects of a technique for diverting asteroids called “ kinetic impactor”. The DART probe crashed into the smaller ( Dimorphos) of the two asteroids which form the binary system Didymos, on September

At the present time ground-based observatories have a wide range of instruments which can study the solar surface in the visible and infrared ranges. But it is not possible to combine these observations with those in the near ultraviolet, which cover the wavelength range from 200 to 400 nanometres, nor to maintain them for long periods due to the turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere. In this context, the Sunrise III mission, in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is collaborating, “ has become the first observatory to obtain spectropolarimetric data simultaneously in the

The Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias hosted this week the global meeting of the members of the European project The Whole Sun , a project approved and funded by the European Research Council (ERC) as part of its Synergy Grant calls. The duration of the project is seven years (from 2019 to 2026) and its full title is: “The whole Sun: untangling the complex physical mechanisms behind our eruptive star and its twins”. The main objective of the ERC’s Synergy Grant calls is to promote the joint work of groups of researchers in different European institutions so that all the necessary tools