The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) is a millimeter wavelength telescope the world's most sensitive, highest resolution, millimeter-wavelength telescope (64 12-meter antennas) in Llano de Chajnantor, Chile. ALMA will bring to millimeter and sub-millimeter astronomy the aperture synthesis techniques of radio astronomy that enable precision imaging to be done on sub-arcsecond angular scales. The richness of the celestial sky at millimeter wavelengths is provided by thermal emission from cool gas, dust, and solid bodies, the same material that shines brightly at far infrared wavelengths. Presently, such natural cosmic emission can be studied only from space with the coarse angular resolution and limited sensitivity that small orbiting telescopes provide.

ALMA will image at 1 mm wavelength with the same 0.01" resolution that will be achieved by the Next Generation Space Telescope. It will provide the VLT and will do so with the same image detail and clarity. In addition, the reconfigurability of ALMA antennas gives ALMA a zoom-lens capability so that it can also make high-fidelity images of large regions of the sky. ALMA is astronomy's complete imaging instrument.

Collaborators
USA, Chile, France, Germany, the Netherlands, UK and Europe: The US side is run by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), operated by Associated Universities, Inc., under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation (NSF). The European side is a collaboration of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy and Nederlandse Onderzoekschool Voor Astronomie, and the United Kingdom Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council

Contact
Charles E. Blue
National Radio Astronomy Observatory
cblue@nrao.edu

Richard West
ESO EPR Dept., Garching bei München, Germany
rwest@eso.org

http://www.alma.nrao.edu