The telescopes will form part of the future Cherenkov Telescope Array in the Northern Hemisphere (CTA-North) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory

On April 13th, the acting Secretary of State for R+D+i, Carmen Vela, presided, together with the Japanese Deputy Minister of Education, Culture, Sport, Science and Technology, Tsutomu Tomioka, over the signing of the collaborative agreement for the installation and operation of four Cherenkov telescopes at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the Island of La Palma. The agreement was signed in Tokyo by Rafael Rebolo, Director of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and Takaaki Kajita, Director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research (ICRR) of the University of Tokyo.

The group of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (IEEC-UB) led by Josep Maria Paredes and Marc Ribó has participated in the scientific objectives definition and are involved in the design and production microelectronics for CTA cameras.

About CTA

The CTA consortium is made up by over 1,200 scientists working in 200 research centres in 32 countries. Spain and Japan are the two major contributors to CTA-North. The objective of the consortium is to build a telescopic array for the detection of extremely high energy gamma rays which yield information about the most violent extreme events occurring in the universe.

The Ministry of Economy and Competitivity has added its major financial effort to those of other international and national entities to bring the CTA-North to Spain, providing a fund of 40 million euros, which is half the total construction cost.

The CTA is formed by two observatories, one in the northern and the other in the southern hemisphere. The total array will be made up of 120 telescopes, distributed between the two. The CTA-North observatory will be sited at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the Island of La Palma, while CTA-South will be at the Observatory of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), at Cerro Paranal (Chile).