VIRGO Status

Virgo is one of the largest ground-based interferometric gravitational wave detectors. The Virgo collaboration has put in a lot of effort in order to achieve significant progress in the commissioning of the detector. That allowed us to achieve the important goal of the first Virgo science run (VSR1) [4] this year. The antenna had been running in science mode for more than four months in 2007, close to its design sensitivity. After VSR1 the commissioning activity was restarted to further improve the detector sensitivity. The road map includes a shutdown in 2008, in order to upgrade the interferometer, to the Virgo+ configuration [5]. A sensitivity exceeding the Virgo design is expected. After this phase a second science run has been planned for 2009. For 2011 another major upgrade is being planned to bring Virgo+ to the advanced-Virgo configuration, the detector level of second generation. In the second section of this paper a VSR1 run summary is provided, while the third section focuses on the detector improvements achieved in this period. The fourth section is devoted to post VSR1 activities and Virgo+. This paper concludes with a brief description of the future advanced-Virgo project [6].