Villaviciosa de Odón, Community of Madrid, Spain
Euclid is an ESA mission to map the geometry of the Universe and better understand the mysterious dark matter and dark energy, which make up most of the energy budget of the cosmos. The mission will investigate the distance-redshift relationship and the evolution of cosmic structures by measuring shapes and redshifts of galaxies and clusters of galaxies out to redshifts ~2, or equivalently to a look-back time of 10 billion years. In this way, Euclid will cover the entire period over which dark energy played a significant role in accelerating the expansion of the Universe. . The ScienceOperations Centre (SOC), located in Madrid, is responsible, among other things, for the development and execution of the Quick Look Analysis (QLA)software, the system in charge of pre-assessing - within 48 hours of data reception- the quality of the data in order to react as soon as possible in case of spacecraft problems (bad configurations, instrumental problems...). It consists of two main parts, 1- the QLA Processing Framework (QPF) provides the processing framework to execute system functionalities and 2-the QLA Diagnostic Tools (QDT) implementing different diagnostic functions to check the quality of all the data. I am in charge to develope the QDT pipeline.
Divulgatore scientifico (assieme a Lorenzo Colombo e Filippo Bonaventura) per il progetto Chi ha paura del buio? dal Dicembre 2013, progetto che conta oltre 280.000 followers su Facebook e oltre 42.000 su Instagram. Abbiamo partecipato alla trasmissione televisiva omonima andata in onda su Italia 1 e scritto il libro edito da Rizzoli "Se tutte le stelle venissero giu'". Abbiamo partecipato a numerosissime conferenze online e dal vivo.
EMIR is a wide-field camera and a multi-object intermediate resolution near-infrared spectrograph (0.9-2.5 microns) for the GTC telescope in La Palma. EMIR will offer several observing modes: imaging mode and multi-object spectroscopy mode. In the imaging mode, the instrument provides a field of view of 6’ x 6’ with a pixel scale of 0.2”/pixel in ZJHK bands. In the multi-object mode, EMIR will be able to obtain spectrum of around 50 objects simultaniously, with a spectral resolution of 4000 in ZJH bands and 3500 in the K-band. As a part of the group of verification scientists of EMIR, I was performing scientific tests at different integration stages, following a guideline to ensure the complete functionality of the instrument shipped to La Palma at the end of May 2016. Before the instrument is fully availble for the scientist community, I partecipated as a member of the EMIR group, in the commisioning and installation of the instrument in the GTC telescope. Furthermore, the performance of the instrument have been tested, to demostrate that the instrument is performing correctly (image quality, magnitude limits, etc). Finally, full test observations have been perfomed for every observing mode, and these data reduced using the EMIR pipeline. Once all the observing modes have been successfully tested the instrument is now available for the science use. As a second part of my work with EMIR, i was developing and testing the exposure time calculator (ETC). Exposure Time Calculator (ETC) give astronomers the ability to predict the signal to noise ratio or the exposure time to achieve it for EMIR/GTC. EMIR ETC is written in XML/python and allow the user to compare different options about his observations, including target information, target spectral energy distribution, instrument setup, atmospheric conditions and observing parameters.
-Responsabile del progetto di ricerca "Hawk-i infrared supernova search in starburst galaxies" -Co-responsabile dei progetti di ricerca: *Spectroscopic characterization of intermediate-redshift type IA Supernovae (Responsabile principale: Enrico Cappellaro); *SN variety and nucleosinthesys yields (Responsabile principale: StefanoBenetti).