There are also three detector units designed, integrated and qualified in Pisa on board the Ixpe satellite, the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer born from the exclusive collaboration between NASA and the Italian Space Agency and left this morning, at 7.00 am. Italian, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The three detector units were created by a working group led by Professor Luca Baldini, who involved seven students and doctoral students from the Pisa University and belonging to the Physics Department and the School of Engineering in the mission. “It is a great honor for our community to have contributed to such an important space mission” commented the Rector of the University of Pisa, Paolo Mancarella.
“What has been achieved is the further demonstration of the strength, at an international level, of the Pisan research area which has always guaranteed us collaborations at the highest level all over the world. In addition to the fact that – said the rector Mancarella – this project It was a very important training experience for our students involved, one of those opportunities that only an excellent university can provide. My congratulations to the whole group led by Luca Baldini for the important result achieved “.
“Last night’s launch represents the culmination of a more than twenty-year effort, in which I had the privilege of participating together with a group of truly extraordinary physicists, engineers and technicians, both professionally and humanly,” said the professor. Luca Baldini, co-head of Ixpe for Infn and lecturer in the Physics Department of the University of Pisa. “Over the last five years – he said – our students and graduate students Alessandra Marrocchesi, Federico Pucci, Hikmat Nasimi, Leonardo Lucchesi, Mattia Barbanera, Niccolò di Lalla and Nunziato Sorrentino, whom I want to name one by one for their skills and dedication demonstrated, they worked in close synergy with the staff of the Infn Section of Pisa, making a fundamental contribution to the development of the mission “. For Baldini “obviously this is not a point of arrival, but only a starting point: we have no more than a week of rest ahead of us, at the end of which we will all be again engaged in the activities of checking the instrument in orbit and, above all, in the analysis of scientific data which, starting from mid-January, will begin to arrive on the ground “.