The British portal, UK Research and Innovation has confirmed that the United Kingdom is to contribute four million pounds (4.6m euros) to the construction of the New Robotic Telescope (NRT) in La Palma, which will be the largest and most important on the planet in its category, costing a total of 28 million euros to build.
It is an optical instrument with a diameter of four metres promoted by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), the University of Oviedo, and the John Moores University of Liverpool; entities that had already agreed to its installation in the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory (ORM), and for whose financing the UK Government is essential through the country's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
According to forecasts, the construction phase of the device would take approximately five years, and will open the door to study physical phenomena in the areas of gravitational waves, planets outside the solar system, supernovae and other topics, within the framework of the so-called " temporal domain astronomy ”, said the IAC in a statement
"The Canary Islands continue to clearly bet on astrophysics and astronomy," said Carlos Navarro, director of the Canary Islands Agency for Research, Innovation and Information Society (ACIISI), while he wanted to highlight the fact that the Islands are "positioning themselves in the premiership of observation leagues of the cosmos”, having been chosen as the venue for other leading proposals, such as the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), the European Solar Telescope (EST) or the Cherenkov Telescope Network (CTA), which all aspire to be located, or are already under construction, on La Palma, which is one of the prime sites in the world for astronomy.
