On Wednesday 30 October, the headquarters of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) received a talk by the first Swiss astronaut, Claude Nicollier, who wanted to share his experience in space with the personnel of the IAC. Claude Nicollier is the first Swiss astronaut to have flown into space. After his studies at the Universities of Geneva and Lausanne, Claude joined ESA as a member of their first group of astronauts. Since 2007 Nicollier has been a Professor at the Federal Polytechnical School at Lausanne. He has spent more than 1000 hours in space (more than 42 days) including a

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located in Chile, today released its first images of the universe, known in astronomy as an instrument's “first light”. This event marks the beginning of a project that will revolutionise our understanding of the universe over the next decade. Jointly funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy (DOE), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is participating, as part of a consortium of Spanish institutions, in its scientific exploitation and contributing observation time from the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC or

The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has started its development of DRAGO-3 , the third generation of its instrument: Demonstrator for Remote Analysis of Ground Observations (DRAGO), designed for Earth observation from space in the short wave infrared region of the spectrum (SWIR). This new instrument comes after the success of DRAGO-1 and DRAGO-2 , which have proved their utility in key applications such as following volcanic eruptions, hydrological monitoring of regions affected by climate change, and the control of forest fires. Both the previous models have shown their