ASTERICS!

© ASTRON

Earlier this month, a large proposal named ASTERICS (Astronomy ESFRI & Research Infrastructure Cluster) was submitted to the Horizon 2020 Call - INFRADEV-4. ASTERICS aims to bring together all the astronomy facilities currently included in the ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) list of opportunities - this includes the SKA, CTA, E-ELT and KM3Net. The various pathfinder facilities (including LOFAR and e-VLBI) are also involved. The image above shows the main partners involved in the project.

The main thrust of the proposal is to typical problems that are common to all of these facilities, in particular the Big Data challenge faced by these facilities and the ambition to properly interface their various data products with the Virtual Observatory. In addition, there are several interesting common technical projects, in particular the synchronisation of time and frequency across distributed arrays. Another interesting feature of ASTERICS is the ambition to open-up the data generated by the ESFRI related astronomy facilities to the general public with a strong commitment to the principles of the recent Science 2.0 initiative and the anticipated development of several citizen scientist applications. The PIs of the major work packages are Giovanni Lamanna (LAPP, Paris), Francoise Genova (CDS, Strasbourg), Huib Jan van Langevelde (JIVE, Dwingeloo) and Stephen Serjeant (Open University, UK).

ASTRON coordinated the submission of the ASTERICS proposal with major contributions from Gert Kruitoff, Rob van der Meer, Emmy Boerma, Andre van Es, Marco de Vos & Anneke Steenbergen.

The proposal is expected to be evaluated over the next few months. The Call is known to be heavily over-subscribed but hopefully it will be well received by the independent review panels. Fingers crossed... !