World’s largest radio telescope, hailed as humanity’s most ambitious astronomy project, to be launched in Chilean desert

Source – NationalPost News

SANTIAGO, Chile — The world’s biggest radio telescope is being launched in a plateau high above Chile’s Atacama desert.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, will search for clues about the dawn of the cosmos — from the coldest gases and dust where galaxies are formed to the energy produced by the Big Bang.

Radio telescope antennas of the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) project are seen in the Chajnantor plateau, Atacama desert, some 1500 km north of Santiago, on March 12,2013. The ALMA, an international partnership project between Europe, North America and East Asia, with the cooperation of Chile, is presently the largest astronomical project in the world. On March 13, 66 high precision antennas will be opened, located at an altitude of 5000 meters above sea level in the extremely arid Atacama desert.

“In fact, it’s more powerful than all of the other radio telescopes in the world put together,” Andreas Lundgren, a Swedish astronomer who gave a tour of the site, told the Miami Herald.

Most of the 66 radio antennas will be inaugurated Wednesday in an official ceremony.

Scientists want to learn more about dark matter, as well as locate new planets, which they hope ALMA will help them accomplish, according to the Miami Herald.

“What we’re starting to do with ALMA is to identify those parts of the universe that contain the ingredients for life,” Ewine van Dishoeck, a Dutch astronomy and professor of astrophysics at Leiden University in the Netherlands, told the newspaper.

“What ALMA can do is zoom into those areas where planets are being formed and see if those ingredients are present.”

Technicians set up a radio telescope antenna of the ALMA project in the Atacama desert, some 1,500 km north of Santiago, on March 12, 2013.

ALMA also reaches farther than any other radio telescope and has captured images different from anything seen before by visible-light and infrared telescopes.

The $1.5 billion project is jointly funded by the United States, Canada, Japan and Europe. It is an engineering triumph that launches Chile to the forefront of ground-based space exploration.

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