FGG Extends Its Scientific Commitment in the Canary Islands: Agreement with IAC for the STRIP Telescope

The Fundación Galileo Galilei – INAF (FGG), in line with its statutory mission, continues to consolidate its presence in the scientific landscape of the Canary Islands. In this context FGG has signed a new agreement with the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) for the construction of an infrastructure that will host the STRIP telescope, part of the cosmology project LSPE-STRIP.

The LSPE (Large Scale Polarization Explorer) is an international collaboration aimed at measuring the polarization of the CMB. It consist of 2 experiments, one flying on a stratospheric baloon (SWIPE) and a telescope in Tenerife for a ground based survey (STRIP).
INAF, with researchers from the Observatories of Bologna and Trieste, was already part of the collaboration between ASI, UniMI, INFN and IAC.
The collaboration has requested the intervention of FGG for the realization of the infrastructure at the Teide Observatory where STRIP will be hosted.
The agreement with IAC has been formalized and published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE)

“With this agreement, FGG reaffirms its commitment to science and research by supporting a project of extraordinary international relevance,” said the director of the FGG, Adriano Ghedina. “We are proud to contribute to a collaboration that places Italy at the center of cutting-edge cosmological research.”
The infrastructure works, already underway, are expected to be completed by the end of the year.

In the picture, the focal plane detector of the STRIP telescope, made of 49 feed-horns for the Q-band receivers (centered at 43GHz) and 3 of the 6 W-band receivers (centred at 95GHz).