ALMA antennas at OSF*

Four large antennas for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) thrust to the sky at the Operations Support Facility (OSF), 2900 m above sea level. ALMA is the largest ground-based astronomy project in existence, and will be comprised of a giant array of fifty 12-m submillimetre quality antennas, with baselines of up to 16 kilometres. An additional, compact array of 7-m and 12-m antennas will complement the main array. Construction of ALMA started in 2003 and will be completed around 2012. The ALMA project is an international collaboration between Europe, East Asia and North America in cooperation with the Republic of Chile.

This image is available as a mounted image in the ESOshop.