The SCITECHSS Group is a research and development team of scientists and engineers based at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía–CSIC (Granada-Spain). It devotes its efforts to develop instruments for the exploration of our Solar System with the aim of obtaining scientific data. The analysis and interpretation of these data allow us to advance in the understanding of the nature of the planets, their satellites, and the small bodies.
Latest news
-
An interestellar object is visiting us!!! Its name, 3I/ATLAS
—
A new interstellar visitor, 3I/ATLAS (provisionally designated A11pl3Z), was discovered on July 1, 2025, by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey, at a heliocentric distance of 4.53 AU. It was confirmed as an interstellar object due to its hyperbolic trajectory, with an eccentricity of 6.1, indicating that it is not gravitationally bound to…
-
Cometary activity challenges scientists: difficult to find a balance in the models between no activity models and too much activity
—
Authors, led by Nicholas Attree in the SCITECHSS group at IAA – CSIC, and in Germany (Technische Universiät Braunschweig, Universität Münster, and the Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung), have published a new paper on thermophysical modelling of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Studying comets is important because they contain some of the most pristine material to be found anywhere in…
-
Laughing gas and the search for life in the Universe
—
Are we alone in the Universe? For the first time in human history, we are on the verge of characterising the atmospheres of distant rocky worlds that could resemble our own Earth. We will be able to search these atmospheres for signs of life, which we call biosignatures. Molecular oxygen (O2), which currently makes up…