Future Observing Facilities

ALMA

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array, or ALMA, is an international collaboration to develop a telescope of revolutionary design to study the universe from a site in the foothills of Chile's Andes Mountains. ALMA will be composed initially of 66 high precision antennas, and operating at wavelengths of 0.3 to 9.6 mm. Its main 12-metre array will have fifty antennas, 12 metres in diameter, acting together as a single telescope — an interferometer. An additional compact array of four 12-metre and twelve 7-metre antennas will complement this. The antennas can be moved across the desert plateau over distances from 150 metres to 16 kilometres, which will give ALMA a powerful variable "zoom". The ALMA correlator, a specialized computer that combines the information received by the antennas, will perform an astounding 16,000 million-million (1.6x10¹⁶) operations per second.

ALMA's construction will be completed around 2012, but early scientific observations with a partial array will begin around 2011. The ALMA Project is a partnership between the scientific communities of East Asia, Europe and North America with Chile.

For more information please read the ALMA page.

E-ELT

ESO has been working together with its user community of European astronomers and astrophysicists to define the new giant telescope needed by the middle of the next decade. More than one hundred astronomers from all European countries have been involved throughout 2006, helping the ESO Project Offices to produce a novel concept, in which performance, cost, schedule and risk were carefully evaluated.

The present concept is that of a telescope with a 42-metre diameter mirror, and is revolutionary. The site of the E-ELT is not yet fixed as studies are still underway with a plan to make a decision by 2010.

With a diameter of 42 metres, the E-ELT will gather 15 times more light than the largest optical telescopes operating today. The telescope has an innovative five-mirror design that includes advanced adaptive optics to correct for the turbulent atmosphere, providing images 15 times sharper than those from the Hubble Space Telescope.

For more information please read the E-ELT page.