The Cherenkov Telescope Array: Exploring the Very-high-energy Sky from ESO’s Paranal Site

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is a next-generation observatory for ground-based very-high-energy gammaray astronomy, using the imaging atmospheric Cherenkov technique to detect and reconstruct gamma-ray induced air showers. The CTA project is planning to deploy 19 telescopes on its northern La Palma site, and 99 telescopes on its southern site at Paranal, covering the 20 GeV to 300 TeV energy domain and offering vastly improved performance compared to currently operating Cherenkov telescopes. The combination of three different telescope sizes (23-, 12and 4-metre) allows cost-effective coverage of the wide energy range. CTA will be operated as a user facility, dividing observation time between a guest observer programme and large Key Science Projects (KSPs), and the data will be made public after a oneyear proprietary period. The history of the project, the implementation of the arrays, and some of the major science goals and KSPs, are briefly summarised.