The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is an international radio telescope under construction in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. ALMA is situated on a dry site at 5000 m elevation, allowing excellent atmospheric transmission over the instrument wavelength range of 0.3 to 10 mm. ALMA will consist of two arrays of high-precision antennas. One, of up to 64 12-m diameter antennas, is reconfigurable in multiple patterns ranging in size from 150 meters up to ~15 km. A second array is comprised of a set of four 12-m and twelve 7-m antennas operating in one of two closely packed configurations ~50 m in diameter. The instrument will provide both interferometric and total-power astronomical information on atomic, molecular and ionized gas and dust in the solar system, our Galaxy, and the nearby to high-redshift universe. In this paper we outline the scientific drivers, technical challenges and planned progress of ALMA.
@article{arxiv.0904.3739,
title = {The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array},
author = {Alwyn Wootten and A. Richard Thompson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0904.3739},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
to be published in Proceedings of the IEEE special issue on radiotelescopes