The goal of the RADIOBLOCKS project is to achieve a maximal boost for the European major world-leading research infrastructures in radio astronomy, which over the years have invested heavily in maintaining existing facilities as well as in substantial upgrade programmes, after identifying common challenges towards their mid- and long-term scientific visions. In this project, the institutes responsible of these facilities join forces, together with partners from industry and academia, in order to develop “common building blocks” for technological solutions beyond state-of-the-art, that will enable a broad range of new science and enhance European scientific competitiveness. They share the need to continuously improve their capabilities in order to enable new science: sensitivity, field of view, bandwidth, angular, time and frequency resolution, commensality and on-sky time, reaction time and RFI mitigation. Engagement with industry to co-develop advanced technologies will increase the partners’ technological levels and strengthen their market positions, creating a true European innovation system. This project carries out carefully targeted development work and addresses common aspects in the complete data chain, categorizing this in four phases: Novel detectors and components, digital receivers, transport and correlator, and data (post)processing. We will design and demonstrate common building blocks based on cutting-edge technologies, that will be enablers and extenders in the areas most critical to the RIs, and can and will be used for upgrades of several RIs. The building blocks will be new instrument components and advanced digital solutions based on newly available (HPC/AI optimized) hardware. This approach will enable a tremendous increase of the science delivery potential of Europe’s major radio astronomical observatories, for science cases that are high on their long-term agendas, aimed at the widest possible science community in Europe and beyond.

The project ACO (AstroChemical Origins) has two main objectives: 1) to unveil the early history of the Solar System, using the chemical composition of today forming Solar-like planetary systems and comparing it with that of the Solar System primitive bodies; 2) to train a new generation of researchers able to tackle this highly interdisciplinary problem, providing them with a wide-range of transferable skills, including the ability to communicate Science to a large audience. This will be obtained by setting up: (a) a coordinated network of PhD research projects which will be carried out by 17 ESRs under the supervision of members of the ACO Beneficiaries; (b) a structured secondment network, to expose ESRs to alternative research environments; (c) a significant exposure of ESRs to the non-academic sector, via PhD co-supervision, secondment, short visits and training from non-academic ACO Beneficiaries and Partners; (d) specific courses at the host institutions as well as network schools with specialized interdisciplinary and transferable skills courses; (e) international conferences open to the scientific community; (f) several activities to make ACO network and its science known to the general public. In order to achieve the ACO objectives, the proposed network is constituted by fourteen Beneficiaries, whose four from the non-academic sector, plus seven Partner Organisations, whose six from the non-academic sector. Each Participating Organization will provide a complementary expertise indispensable to achieve of the ACO objectives: (i) instrumental, observational, theoretical, computational, modeling, and experimental to reach the scientific goal and, (ii) on informatics, scientific presentation and management, for completing the wide-transferable training.

For more than two decades, the EU has been supporting free transnational access (TA) to existing national research infrastructures (RI). In particular, the optical/infrared and the advanced radio astronomy communities are now recognised as TA flagship communities. Their telescopes and instrumentation complement each other with respect to wavelength coverage, as well as spectral, spatial and time resolution, and therefore together form a cohesive suite of RIs that made ground breaking discoveries possible and thus strengthened Europe's leading role in international science. While scientists more and more rely on multi-wavelength and multi-disciplinary access to the best RIs, there is a quest by the RI providers for a sustainable funding scheme for TA, since establishing and maintaining outstanding RIs requires considerable resources. In this pilot, the best research institutions from both communities will combine their efforts to further improve and harmonize their services and to make best use of their RIs, allowing mutual and TA to telescopes, telescope networks, and data archives. This will facilitate multi-wavelengths and time-domain studies. TA shall be simplified by the development of a common proposal submission tool. Improved instruments, adaptive optics, and software to deliver science ready data products will boost the performance of our RIs. This pilot will address imminent threats to astronomical research from satellite mega constellations and commercial radio emitters, and finally, it will develop plans for a long-term mutual relationship and for a continued funding of TA beyond this pilot.