Riccardo Giacconi, one of the X-ray astronomy pioneers, recently passed away

Riccardo Giacconi passed away on December 9th, at the age of 87 years. Riccardo Giacconi born in Genoa on 1931 and won the physics Nobel prize on 2002. He was one of the founder of X-ray astronomy. Riccardo played a fundamental role in the developing of the X-ray observatory Einstein and gave a major contribution for other important missions such as Chandra, the Hubble Space Telescope, the VLT, and ALMA. Riccardo was the founding director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in the 1981 and the director of the European Southern Observatory from 1993 to 1999.