About us

IAPS

IAPS (Institute of Space Astrophysics and Planetology) is one of the 16 facilities belonging to INAF distributed throughout Italy and is based in the Tor Vergata area (in Rome). 

The institute hosts about 130 staff (permanent and fixed-term), about 40 staff in training (PostDocs, doctoral students, undergraduates) and about 30 attending research associates, and is among the main players in the international panorama of astrophysics research, thanks to an intense collaboration with the most important international Space Agencies (NASA, ESA, ASI, JAXA, CSA), with the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and with other national and international research organizations in the field.


IAPS story

The IAPS institute was born in January 2012 from the union of two historical institutes of the Roman Area: the IASF (Institute of Space Astrophysics and Cosmic Physics) and the IFSI (Institute of Interplanetary Space Physics), born in the late 1960s in the Frascati Research Area. The IASF was initially founded as the "Laboratory of Space Astrophysics" by Livio Gratton, while the IFSI came to life at the behest of Edoardo Amaldi who, at the suggestion of Bruno Rossi, created the "Research and Technology Laboratory for the Study of Interplanetary Plasma" in the same years. The two Institutes, later merged into the CNR, moved in the year 1998 to the new Tor Vergata Research Area in Rome. In 2005 they merged into INAF, the national institute created with the aim of unifying all observatories and research institutes active in the field of space astrophysics in Italy.