English (UK)
The Monitoring Commission of the agreement signed with the "Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad" for the execution of the "MIOCA-Mejora del Instrumental del Observatorio de Calar Alto" project, was set up.
The project’s budget of 1.129.098 €, will allow consolidate the competitiveness of Calar Alto Observatory.
The Spanish-German Astronomical Center (CAHA) has the purpose of the management, maintenance, operation and scientific exploitation of the Calar Alto Observatory, making it available to the international astronomical community, as well as giving the capacity and the infrastructure needed for carrying out astronomical observation programs and developing innovative concepts concerning instrumentation. Now, CAHA faces up an improvement of its instrumentation in order to continue at the forefront of the astronomical observation.
The action, which will be carried out thanks to the ERDF co-financing, are addressed to the improvement of CAFE and CARMENES instruments, together with the development of the Energetic Island, which seeks to “once again put the Calar Alto Observatory as a reference location, in this case as a technological center aware of the environment, so that a very high percentage of the energy resources our facilities need will come from renewable energy sources. This could serve as a pilot test for other similar observatories”, Calar Alto Observatory’s Director, Jesús Aceituno, points.
The total budget of this project is 1.129.098 €, where 80% of such funds are co-financing with European Regional Development Funds (ERDF), corresponding with the “Programa Operativo Crecimiento Inteligente 2014-2020”, assigned to the “Secretaría General de Ciencia e Innovación”, and allocated for financing projects and actuations related with infrastructures included within the current map of “Infraestructuras Científicas y Técnicas Singulares(ICTS)” . These actuations will serve to ensure and consolidate Calar Alto Observatory competitiveness as one of the reference observatories within the Spanish astronomy development.
Calar Alto Observatory is one of the infrastructures that belongs to the “Mapa Nacional de Infraestructuras Científicas y Técnicas Singulares (ICTS)”, approved on October 7th 2014 by the “Consejo de Política de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación”.
The German-Spanish Calar Alto Observatory is located at Sierra de los Filabres, north of Almería (Andalucía, Spain). It is jointly operated by the Instituto Max Planck de Astronomía in Heidelberg, Germany, and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (CSIC) in Granada, Spain. Calar Alto has three telescopes with apertures of 1.23m, 2.2m and 3.5m. A 1.5m aperture telescope, also located at the mountain, is operated under control of the Observatorio de Madrid.
COMMUNICATION – CALAR ALTO OBSERVATORY
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