Submillimeter telescope

Five partners will begin building a 25-meter submillimeter telescope in Chile next year. Completion of the Cornell Caltech Atacama Telescope is expected in 2013.

CCAT will be built at 5600 meters atop Cerro Chajnantor in Chile’s Atacama desert, about 10 km from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array already under construction. With a wider field of view than ALMA’s, says CCAT project manager Tom Sebring of Cornell University, “our telescope is much better at mapping large areas of the sky and identifying objects in the submillimeter, which ALMA will be superb at doing further investigations of.”

CCAT will observe at wavelengths from 200 μm to greater than 1 mm. Among CCAT’s science goals are to develop a model for galaxy formation and evolution at millimeter wavelengths for later integration with existing models at other wavelengths and to do a survey of star-formation sites in the Milky Way.

The partners in the project are Caltech, Cornell, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of British Columbia and the University of Waterloo in Canada, and the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. They will contribute varying amounts to the estimated $100 million construction cost.