NEO-MAPP Role:
Dr. Licandro is a permanent researcher at the IAC (Cientifico Titular OPI) with 20 years of experience in the field of physical and compositional properties of minor bodies of the Solar System. Since he got his PhD in 2002, he worked as a support astronomer for the TNG and the ING telescopes in La Palma (2002-2007), gaining an invaluable observational and instrumental/technological experience. Dr. Licandro’s scientific expertise covers from the near-Earth asteroids to the dwarf planets in the trans-Neptunian belt. He has authored more than 160 papers published in international refereed journals (h=29), with almost 3000 cites. He is currently a member of the science team of the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission, member of several working groups of the ESA Hera mission and he is actively involved in NASA future missions like Lucy or Psyche. He was a member of the core-team of proponents of the ESA M3 MarcoPolo-R mission and co-PI of the camera/spectrograph in the thermal infrared (THERMAP) selected as payload of this mission. In this sense, he is currently PI of several projects at the IAC to develop thermal detectors for planetary space missions, based on arrays of micro-bolometers. He was also one of the proponents of the ESA M4 MarcoPolo-2D, MarcoPolo-M5, CASTAway, and CASTALIA missions.