The Spanish Minister of Science and Innovation, Diana Morant, presided over the annual meeting of the Governing Council of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in the IACTEC building in La Laguna last Monday. Later, in a press conference she recognised the technological and research activity of the Institute and its collaborators during the pandemic.
In the afternoon, together with IAC's Director and Instrumentation Coordinator (Rafael Rebolo and José Alfonso López Aguerri respectively), she visited the IACTEC facilitates and got to know the projects that are being developed in the centre. Carlos Gutierrez, co-principal investigator of the New Robotic Telescope, explained the relevance of the project to the Minister at a national and international level, updated her on the progress done over the past year on the Preliminary Design Review and introduced some of the NRT engineers based in Spain.
The collaboration with the other NRT partners, Liverpool John Moores University and the Oviedo University, as well as, the creation of the Advanced Optical Systems Centre (CSOA) to manufacture the NRT mirrors were highlighted during the visit of the Minister.
In the following we share a few pictures of the moment when the Science Minister and IAC's Director spoke to the NRT team members.
