The ICE-CSIC Annual Report 2025 is now available. It presents a summary of ICE-CSIC’s research, activities and highlights throughout the year. 

The year started with the celebration of ICE-CSIC's 25th anniversary conference in February. Under the theme “25 Years of Discovery and Innovation”, members of the institute gathered for three days in Barcelona to reflect on the past, present and future of the centre. It provided an opportunity to review the institute’s evolution, its current research and discuss future directions in astrophysics and space sciences.

Highlights

After the restructuring of the four ICE-CSIC departments in 2024, the scientific groups within these departments were reorganised during 2025 into a total of eleven research groups. The institute continued to grow throughout the year, reaching a total of 168 ICE-CSIC people as of 31 December 2025. Three new permanent staff members joined the centre: Daniela Hadasch and Tony Mroczkowski as Faculty members, and David Roma as Tecnólogo in the Advanced Engineering Unit. In July, the former institute manager Àngels Benet retired after nine years of dedicated service, and Xavier Mestre assumed the role of institute Manager.

The year was also particularly significant for the space missions in which ICE-CSIC is involved: like Euclid, LISA, ILIADA and HydroGNSS. In March 2025, the Euclid Consortium published its first Quick Release (Q1), accompanied by 34 scientific and technical papers, followed by a second set of seven publications in November, based on early Data Release One (DR1) data, presenting important advances including new studies of galaxy morphology and strong gravitational lensing. Meanwhile, LISA, the first gravitational-wave observatory in space, continued its implementation phase with a planned launch in 2035. During 2025, the mission’s prime contractor formally began activities and initiated a co-engineering phase with the different subsystems. 

ICE-CSIC researchers were also involved in the development of ILIADA (In-OrbitLISA Diagnostics Demonstrator), a LISA technology demonstrator selected to fly aboard the GENEO-02 CubeSat, a satellite promoted within the Generalitat de Catalunya’s NewSpace strategy and expected to be launched in 2026. 

The year also witnessed the launch of ESA’s HydroGNSS mission, which will provide key observations of humidity, freezing conditions, flooding, and biomass, contributing to a better understanding of the water cycle and the impacts of climate change. In addition, ICE-CSIC won the tender to develop and implement the first Spanish Earth Observation constellation of satellites, called Atlantic Constellation. 

As for the ground-based observatories in which ICE-CSIC participates, the European Commission established the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), marking a major step toward becoming the world’s most powerful observatory for gamma-ray astronomy. Later in the year, the agreement between the Barcelona–Madrid consortium and Rubin–LSST was formally signed, making all consortium members, including ICE-CSIC, official participants in the LSST collaboration.

As for the ICE-CSIC Advanced Engineering Unit, it developed several improvements of the centre’s laboratories to offer better services to the engineers and experimental researchers. A major development was the acquisition and installation of a new thermal vacuum chamber in the Optical Laboratory, enabling controlled simulations of space conditions with pressures down to 10-⁷ mbar and temperatures ranging from −85 to220 ºC.

2025 Key figures

Check out the main data regarding research projects, personnel, papers, conferences, awards, social media impact and more.