Alejandro Cardesín knows what he is talking about when you ask him about space missions. He has been working for ten years in the European Space Agency (ESA), involved in several projects studying the Solar System, including the Rosetta mission to Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and Venus Express. At the present time, this telecommunications engineer is part of the projects to explore Mars, such as Mars Express and Exo Mars, which was put into orbit around the red planet a few weeks ago. One of its objectives will be to examine the conditions for the development of life on the planet. But his

Before getting his PhD in Astronomy and Planetary Science at the University of Aix-Marseille, Sebastien Besse studied Natural Sciences, but gradually he specialized in the geology of the bodies of the Solar System and in spectroscopy. After working in the University of Maryland (EEUU) and the headquarters of the European Space Agency (ESA) in The Hague (The Netherlands), he continues investigating his favorite subjects: the Moon, Mercury, minor bodies, spectroscopy and geology of the Solar System... Since last year, he is in the European Center for Space Astronomy (ESAC), ESA headquarters in

Since he was a PhD student dealing with the volcanism of Io, one of Jupiter's satellites, he has been constantly trying to get to know the coldest and distant objects in the Solar System by space missions Spitzer, Herschel, and the future James Webb Space Telescope. The confines of our planetary system and the instruments on board space satellites are the specialty of John Stansberry, researcher of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), in the United States, and lecturer of the XXVIII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics , organized by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

Scientists working with the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) observatory report the discovery of the most distant gamma-ray source ever observed at very high energies, thanks to the “replay” of an enormous flare by a galactic gravitational lens as foreseen by Einstein’s General Relativity.

Between her stay at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, in Garafía (La Palma), where Julia de León was gathering data for her PhD thesis on over a hundred asteroids, and the NASA space missions in which she is now involved, there have been years of enormous effort and observations. In La Palma she began to specialize in the mineral composition of asteroids, and as the years have passed her research is still oriented towards discovering what is happening on objects which are a thousands of kilometres from us, to understand better what is happening here on Earth. Today this researcher at

The XXVIII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics, which will last until 16th November, began with the lectures by Sebastien Lebonnois, a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, and an expert in the atmospheres of planets such as Venus and Titan.