  ASTRI is a Flagship Project financed by the Italian Ministry of Education,
University and Research, and led by INAF, the Italian National Institute of
Astrophysics. Within this framework, INAF is currently developing an end-to-end
prototype of a Small Size Telescope in a dual-mirror configuration (SST-2M) for
the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), scheduled to start data acquisition in
2014. Although the ASTRI SST-2M prototype is mainly a technological
demonstrator, it will perform scientific observations of the Crab Nebula, Mrk
421 and Mrk 501 at E>1 TeV. A remarkable improvement in terms of performance
could come from the operation, in 2016, of a SST-2M mini-array, composed of a
few SST-2M telescopes to be placed at final CTA Southern Site. The SST
mini-array will be able to study in great detail relatively bright sources (a
few x 10E-12 erg/cm2/s at 10 TeV) with angular resolution of a few arcmin and
energy resolution of about 10-15%. Thanks to the stereo approach, it will be
possible to verify the wide field of view (FoV) performance through the
detections of very high-energy showers with core located at a distance up to
500 m, to compare the mini-array performance with the Monte Carlo expectations
by means of deep observations of selected targets, and to perform the first CTA
science at the beginning of the mini-array operations. Prominent sources such
as extreme blazars, nearby well-known BL Lac objects and radio-galaxies,
galactic pulsar wind nebulae, supernovae remnants, micro-quasars, and the
Galactic Center can be observed in a previously unexplored energy range, in
order to investigate the electron acceleration and cooling, relativistic and
non relativistic shocks, the search for cosmic-ray (CR) Pevatrons, the study of
the CR propagation, and the impact of the extragalactic background light on the
spectra of the sources.
