The world's largest radio telescope completed and working at full capacity

In Chile, the world's largest (and, concurrently, the most expensive) radio telescope in the world has finally been completed. It is called ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array). The project spent 1.5 billion dollars and a few months time. The last antenna was delivered on June 13 of this year.

The radio telescope itself is not monolithic, that is, it is not one huge “plate”. The system consists of 66 elements, antennas, which are located on the Chahnantor plateau in the Atacama Desert, Chile. By the way, the plateau is quite high - 5 thousand meters above sea level, so the place chosen is very good.
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The project, as already noted, is very expensive, so it was implemented by several organizations at once, from different regions, including Europe, North America, and East Asia. At the very beginning, ALMA was implemented by the European Southern Observatory and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and some time later the National Research Council of Canada, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Sinica Academy (ASIAA) and the Republic of Chile joined.



Not all antennas that make up a system are the same size. 54 - with a diameter of "plates" of 12 meters, and 12 - with a diameter of 7 meters. ALMA senses a radiation spectrum with a wavelength of a millimeter or less. Earlier, radio telescopes did not track (with rare exceptions) this range, but now scientists have received a new, powerful tool capable, in the words of one of the project participants, to “cut a window into the Universe”.



The signal coming from the antennas is processed by a Chinese squad with a supercomputer with a capacity of 17 quadrillion operations per second.

By the way, about the project itself, its goals and objectives there is a whole film (in English):



Via spacedaily